Morphology

1. MORPHOLOGY
MA IV Sem
Paper II Language
Unit ! Morphology
Dr. Abha Pandey
Professor
Govt. Mahakoshal College Jabalpur

2. MORPHOLOGY
⦿ Meaning and definition
⦿ Morphology is commonly defined as the scientific
study of the internal structure of words.
⦿ Words have phonological, orthographical and
syntactic properties.
⦿ The term ‘morph’ (Greek) means form and
morphology means the study of forms of words.
⦿ In linguistics morphology refers to mental system
involved in formation of words.
⦿ Morphology looks at how individual words are
formed from smaller chunks of meaningful units
called morphemes.

3. EXAMPLES
⦿ unhappiness un-happi-ness
⦿ un carries negative meaning
⦿ happy is an adjective (feeling)
⦿ -ness expresses as state or quality
⦿ Horses horse-s
⦿ -s expresses plurality
⦿ Walking walk-ing
⦿ Walk is a verb (movement)
⦿ -ing expresses the sense of duration

4. MORPHEME
⦿ Morpheme is the smallest indivisible unit of
semantic content and grammatical function
⦿ They are not identical to a word.
⦿ A single word can have one or more
morpheme.
⦿ Morphemes may or may not stand alone
where as words stand alone.
⦿ A morpheme can be defined as a minimal
unit having more or less constant meaning
and more or less constant form.

5. TYPES OF MORPHEMES
1. FREE VS. BOUND MORPHEME
⦿ Free morphemes stand alone example: yes,
no etc.
⦿ Bound morphemes never exist as words
themselves, but are always attached to some
other morpheme.
⦿ Example: Un, -s,-er, -ing, -ment
⦿ Identifying the number and types of
morphemes that a given word consists of, is
looking at what is referred to as the
structure of a word.

6. MORPHEME
⦿ Every word has at least one free morpheme,
which is referred to as the root, stem, or
base.
⦿ Bound morphemes can further be divided :
affixes, portmanteau, empty, zero, clitics.
⦿ Affixes
⦿ Prefix un-like
⦿ Suffix rich-ness
⦿ Infix d-um-ater=wiser (Tagalog)
⦿ Circumflix ke-adil-an= fairness (Malay)

7. TYPES OF MORPHEMES: AFFIXES
⦿ Affixes are also classified as
⦿ Derivational vs. Inflectional afiixes.
⦿ Derivational morphemes create or derive
new words by changing the meaning or by
changing the word class of the word.
⦿ Example
⦿ Happy----- unhappiness ( Adj--N)
⦿ Girl--------girlish (N-Adj)
⦿ Modern-------modernize (adj—V)
⦿ Beautiful----beautifully (Adj—Adv)
⦿ In English: Derivatioal morphemes can be
either prefixes or suffixes. Eg. Un-happiness

8. AFFIXES: INFLECTIONAL MORPHEME
⦿ Inflectional morphemes don’t alter words
the meaning or word class of a word.
⦿ Instead they only refine and give extra
information about word’s already existing
meaning.
⦿ They create new forms of the same wordwith
addition of grammatical propeties.
⦿ Nominal suffix: cats-plural, cat’s-possessive
⦿ Adjectival: dark, darker, darkest.
⦿ Verbal: Walk –walking, plays, walked.

9. INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES
⦿ In English: Inflectional morphemes are all
suffixes (by chance, since in other langauges
this is not true.)
⦿ There are only 8 inflectional morphemes in
English:
⦿ -s - 3rd
person singular present
⦿ -ed past tense, - ing progressive
⦿ -en past participle
⦿ -s- plural, -’s -possessive
⦿ -er -comparative, -est -superlative

10. INFLECTIONAL SUFFIXES
⦿ Inflexional morphemes are required by syntax.
⦿ That is , they indicate syntactic or semantic
relations between different words in a sentence.
⦿ For example:
⦿ Nim loves
⦿ But
⦿ They love bananas.

11. 2. PORTMANTEAU, EMPTY
MORPHEME
⦿ (ii) Portmanteau morphemes carry more
than one piece of meaning.
⦿ Itcannot be broken down into separate
morphemes.
⦿ E.g. -s means singular, present and 3rd
person, but these meanings cannot be
separated.
⦿ (iii) Empty morphemes have structure phone
but no meaning example in the word
Cran-berry, though Berry has meaning, cran
does not have a meaning of its own.

12. IV. ZERO MORPHEME
⦿ (iv) Zero morpheme are physically
not present in the word yet fulfill
the requirement of the language.
⦿ Eg. the word ‘cut’ has the same
form in both past and present tense
and past.
⦿ It is the null morphemes added to
the root,thus it has a function but
no form.

13. (V) CLITICS
⦿ Clitics have grammatical rather than lexical
meaning.
⦿ They belong to closed classes like pronouns,
preposition and conjunctions.
⦿ Clitics are usually attached to the edges of
the words, outside the derivational and
inflectional affixes.
⦿ E.g. contraction of the morpheme is, as in
What’s going on?

14. CLASSIFICATION OF MORPHEMES
⦿ Morpheme are classified as
⦿ Free - Bound - Zero
⦿ Bound morphemes are
⦿ Affixes- clitics-portmanteau-
Empty
⦿ Affixes
⦿ Prefix-Suffix-Inflix-Circumfix
⦿ Derivational & Inflectional

15. MORPHEME AND SYLLABLE
⦿ A morpheme is not equal to a syllable:
⦿ Coats has 1 syllable , but 2 morphemes.
⦿ Syllables has 2 syllables, but only 1
morpheme
⦿ Example the word ‘buyers’ is made up of
three morphemes
⦿ {buy} +{er}+{s}.
⦿ In the formation of multi morphemic words
(Words that have more than one morpheme)
⦿ Morphemes do not combine in arbitrary ways,
they follow a definite pattern.

16. MORPHEME AND WORD
⦿ Morpheme can have varying size one cannot
judge whether something is a morpheme or
not by relying only on the number of syllables
or the length of the word.
⦿ Example ‘constituent’ a long word and a
plural marker ‘-s’ qualify as a morpheme.
⦿ Yes is a morpheme, but also happens to be a
word.