Morphology

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words, and the rules that form words.

• Content words: Nouns, verbs, adjectives (denote concepts and ideas)
  • Aka open class words (we can add new ones)
• Function words: Conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns (specify grammatical relations, have little or no semantic content)
  • Aka closed class words (new ones rarely enter the language)
  • Slips of the tongue happen w/ content words but not w/ function words
• Morpheme: The most elemental unit of grammatical form (1 word can have >=1 morpheme — e.g., desire + able + ity, anti + dis + establish + ment + ari + an + ism)
  • Linguistic sign: Arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning to form a morpheme
• Monomorphemic word: A single morpheme (ex: finger — -er does not modify fing)
• Decomposition of words into morphemes illustrates discreteness of language
• Free morphemes can stand alone as words; affixes/bound morphemes cannot
  • Prefixes precede other morphemes; suffixes follow other morphemes
  • Infixes are inserted into other morphemes (not in English except cuss words)
  • Circumfixes/discontinuous morphemes surround other morphemes
• Morphologically complex words have a morpheme root and 1+ affixes
  • Stem: When a root is combined with an affix (ex — root: believe, stem: believe + able, word: un + believe + able) — you can add more affixes to form a more complex stem
  • Bound roots acquire meaning only in combination with other morphemes (ex: -cieve in receive is a root/has meaning in Latin, but not in English)
• Morphological rules: The rules of word formation in a language
• Bound morphemes (-ify, -arian) also called derivational morphemes; form that results from adding a derivational morpheme to another morpheme: derived word
• Adding a new word to the lexicon via morphological rules may block other derivations (ex: now that we have Commun + ist, Commun + ite and Commun + ian do not exist)
• Inflectional morphemes: Bound morphemes that mark properties like tense, number, person, etc (ex: the -s and -ed in “I sail” vs “He sails” vs “John sailed”)
  • English inflectional morphemes: -s (third-person singular present), -ed (past tense), -ing (progressive), -en (past participle), -s (plural), -'s (possessive), -er (comparative), -est (superlative)
  • Inflectional morphemes follow derivational morphemes in a word, and are productive: apply freely to nearly every appropriate base
• Case of a noun: the grammatical relation of a noun in a sentence
  • Case morphology: When case is marked by inflectional morphemes
  • Reduplication: Inflecting a word through the repetition of part or all of the word

Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphemes

• Inflectional: Grammatical function; no word class change; small or no meaning change; often required by rules of grammar; follow derivational morphemes in a word; productive

• Derivational: Lexical function; may cause word class change; some meaning change; never required by rules of grammar; precede inflectional morphemes in a word; some productive, many nonproductive

• Words have hierarchical structure that can be represented using tree diagrams

• Suppletive: Irregular forms that must be retrieved directly from the lexicon and cannot be formed by applying morphological rules to the base morpheme

• Lexical gaps/accidental gaps: “Words” that conform to the rules of word formation but are not truly part of the vocabulary (ex: impossible = systemer; possible but nonexistent = magnificenter)

• Back-formations: Words that enter the language b/c of incorrect morphological analysis (ex: bi- in bikini being misinterpreted as a prefix to make monokini and tankini)

• Rightmost word in a compound word is the head of the compound; determines its broad meaning and grammatical category (ex: a smartwatch is a watch/a noun)

  • Unheaded compounds are not determined by the rightmost word (ex: walkman, lowlife, sabertooth)

• Malapropism: The confusion of a word through misinterpretation of its morphemes