COGNATE ELECTIVE 2 – Stylistics and Discourse Analysis

Morphemes to Words

I. Learning objectives
At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:
• distinguish the impacts of word classes in determining the meaning of a text;
• discuss the types of morphemes and its corresponding usage; and
• provide word revisions to texts and write descriptions using varied word classes.

II. Content Focus

Phonemes come together to form more meaningful units – morphemes and words. Words have different
grammatical functions depending on their lexical category or word class.

There are two types of word class:

A. Major word classes are often also called lexical words or content words.
• Nouns - often characterized as ‘naming words’, primarily designate people or things (e.g., boy,
cat, table)
• Lexical verbs - considered as ‘doing words’, tend to express actions, processes, and events (e.g.,
walked, write, thinking)
• Adjectives - as ‘describing words’, impart attributes or traits (e.g., beautiful, red, bright) and can
be made comparative (brighter, stronger) or superlative (strongest, worst)
• Adverbs - optional parts of speech that modify or ‘add to the verb’, typically provide further
information about manner, place, or time (how, where, when) (e.g., slowly, somewhere, today)
B. Minor word classes are sometimes called grammatical words or function words.
• articles/determiners (e.g., definite: the; indefinite: a, an)
• conjunctions (e.g., coordinating: and, but, so; subordinating: because, although)
• modifiers and intensifiers (e.g., rarely, very, extremely)
• prepositions (e.g., for, in, off, on, out, to)
• personal pronouns (e.g., personal: I, you, he/she; impersonal: it, one)
• possessive pronouns (e.g., my, our, your, his/her)
• relative pronouns (e.g., who)
• demonstrative pronouns/demonstratives (e.g., this, that)
• auxiliary verbs/auxiliaries (e.g., be, do, have)
• modal auxiliary verbs/modals (e.g., will, could, might, must)
In stylistics, the analysis of minor grammatical word classes is just as important as that of major word
classes. Indeed, the way that grammatical words combine with lexical words is often of great interest to stylisticians.
This is partly because words exist in structural relationships.

Example:

A noun such as ‘book’ could be used within a larger noun phrase such as ‘the useful stylistics book’. In this
case, the noun ‘book’ has been introduced by the definite article ‘the’ and pre-modified by two adjectives ‘useful’
and ‘stylistics’. It could also be post-modified, for instance, as ‘the useful stylistics book with the cool cover’ where
a prepositional phrase has been appended after the noun. Despite the presence of other word classes, ‘the useful
stylistics book’ is a noun phrase because in the context of a sentence it would occupy the grammatical slot reserved
for nouns and because ‘book’ is the head or most important word.

Phrases can take various grammatical forms: as well as noun phrases, for example, there are also verb
phrases. A verb such as ‘read’ could be part of a verb phrase such as ‘has read’. A familiarity with lexical word class
allows you to be systematic in understanding how words function in their literary context.

Example: from Grace Nichols’ poem “Shopping”

I’m guilty of buying too little food

1 carton milk
1 carton juice
1 half chicken a little veg
and fruit
 COGNATE ELECTIVE 2 – Stylistics and Discourse Analysis

Although the opening line of ‘Shopping’ provides context with which to interpret the four following lines as a
shopping list, such an interpretation is strengthened by acknowledging that the list effect is also the result of stylistic
composition. It reads like an itemized list because of its graphological layout and because each of the four lines is
composed as a noun phrase. Moreover, the ellipsis (deletion) of the preposition ‘of’ in ‘carton [of] milk’ and ‘carton
[of] juice’ as well as the missing determiner in ‘half [a] chicken’ enhance the sense of the list as notation. In this
way, paying attention to word classes contributes to the rigor and replicability of stylistic analysis; it is rigorous
because it involves paying close attention to the composition of the text’s language, and replicable because stylistic
analysis is transparent, allowing others to see how you have reached the conclusion that the text can be interpreted as
a shopping list.

Morphemes
Words are composed of morphemes. A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning.

• Monomorphemic or Simplex Words - words composed of only one morpheme, like ‘pen’, ‘read’, and
‘homage’. The word ‘when’ is also a simplex word since it cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful
units: ‘wh’, ‘whe’, and ‘en’ are not meaningful constituents and even though ‘hen’ is a real word, it does
not appear within ‘when’ in a meaningful way.
• Polymorphemic or Complex Words - words that contain more than one morpheme. Putting the two
morphemes ‘read’ and ‘-ing’ together, makes ‘reading’, a word composed of two morphemes; ‘un-’,
‘present’, and ‘-able’ can be combined to make a three-morpheme word ‘unpresentable’; and so on.

Types of Morphemes

• Lexical Morphemes - Words that have meaning by themselves.

Examples: hate, bicycle, sense, catsup
• Grammatical Morphemes - words that function to specify the relationship between one lexical morpheme
and another.
Examples: at, in, on, -ed, -s
• Free Morphemes - Can stand alone as words (root word, stem, base).
Examples: boy, food, in, on
• Bound Morphemes - Never exist as words and occur only in combination.
Examples: -ed, -s, -ing, -est, -er, -’s

a. Derivational morphemes - changes word meaning or part of speech (either prefix or suffix).
Examples: -ful, -like, -ly, un-, dis-, -y, -al, -ment, -ship, mis-

b. Inflectional morphemes - serves a grammatical function; not creating a new word but only a different
form of the same word (always a suffix). Examples: e.g. -s, -est, -ing, -er
 COGNATE ELECTIVE 2 – Stylistics and Discourse Analysis

The process of word creation is known as productivity. Thus, when speakers use morphological rules to
build words, for instance through affixation, this is productive.

The poet e. e. cummings is well known for his techniques of morphological deviation. For instance, look at these
opening lines from another of his poems, ‘unlove’s the heavenless hell and homeless home’ (1994 [1958]: 765)

unlove’s the heavenless hell and homeless home of

knowledgeable shadows(quick to seize each nothing which all soulless wraiths proclaim
substance;all heartless spectres,happiness) lovers alone wear sunlight. Analysis:

In the first line, we can see two cases of morphological deviation: ‘unlove’ and ‘heavenless’. In the former,
cummings adds the prefix ‘un-’ while in the latter cummings adjoins the suffix ‘-less’. In essence, cummings is
practicing derivational morphology, creating new words out of existing words (notice that ‘unlove’ remains a noun
whereas
‘-less’ changes the word class of ‘heaven’ from noun to adjective in ‘heavenless’). However, although the
morphological rule is sound (‘un-’ and ‘-less’ do serve the derivational function of creating new words), ‘unlove’
and ‘heavenless’ are less recognizable as words (they are more externally deviant) than other similar constructions in
the poem, such as ‘homeless’, ‘soulless’, and ‘heartless’. While in linguistic terms, ‘unlove’ and ‘heavenless’ are
less productive, readers can still interpret meaning in this poem. In the poem’s opening, cummings refutes love
through the negative prefix ‘un-’. By describing it tautologically as a ‘heavenless hell’ and a ‘homeless home’,
cummings implies that unloving is an uncomfortable and lonely experience. Love, in contrast, is cast as a precious
state in cummings’ metaphor, ‘lovers alone wear sunlight’.

Morphological Deviations

Following Plett (2010), we can distinguish four main strategies of morphological deviation: addition,
subtraction, permutation, and substitution. These processes are used to make words which are externally deviant,
therefore unusual and foregrounded.
 COGNATE ELECTIVE 2 – Stylistics and Discourse Analysis

Morphological Play in Concrete Poetry

Edwin Morgan was a Scottish poet, born in Glasgow in 1920. He received a number of awards and honours
for his poetry: in 1999, he became Glasgow’s first Poet Laureate, a position he held until 2005; in 2000, he received
the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; and he was the National Poet for Scotland from 2004 until his death in 2010.
His work is highly eclectic in style, but from the 1960s onwards Morgan often produced concrete poetry. ‘Space
Sonnet & Polyfilla’ (1990 [1977]: 341) is one such example. The poem appears as two pieces – one entitled ‘Space
Sonnet’, the other ‘Polyfilla’ – which despite their separation are indivisible:

Analysis:

As the title suggests, ‘Space Sonnet’ is a fourteen-line sonnet. The title is also a play on words, with
‘Space’ indicating both the poem’s setting on Mars as well as the fact that Morgan has extracted parts of words and
left graphological spaces in their place. These extractions are then presented in the second sonnet ‘Polyfilla’, where
they sit in the same graphological location as they would in the poetic line from which they have been extricated.
Consequently, in order to read the full text of ‘Space Sonnet & Polyfilla’, readers have to add the particles of
‘Polyfilla’ into the lines of ‘Space Sonnet’.

Taken together, the two pieces communicate a rather surreal narrative. Combining both pieces, the poem
reads:
 COGNATE ELECTIVE 2 – Stylistics and Discourse Analysis

In this version, the particles from ‘Polyfilla’ have been underlined. The truth of the poem’s strange and
fantastical setting on Mars is hard to ascertain, since the poetic voice’s mention of ‘penal therapy’ and emphatic call
to a ‘Guard!’ raises questions about the speaker’s sanity; such uncertainty is perhaps enhanced by the poem’s form
with the spaces in ‘Space Sonnet’ and the textual fragments in ‘Polyfilla’ suggesting a disordered mind.

Morgan’s choices of what to extract as textual fragments in ‘Polyfilla’ experiment with morphological
structure.

Four different effects of Morgan’s textual extractions. The first is morphologically unproductive in that
a word is split with neither the remaining letters in ‘Space Sonnet’ nor the extracted fragment in ‘Polyfilla’
resembling free morphemes. This is the case in L4 and L9 where the words ‘tight’ and ‘therapy’ have ‘tig’ and ‘apy’
extracted into ‘Polyfilla’ leaving ‘ht’ and ’ther’ in ‘Space Sonnet’. In contrast, a second effect is that both the
extraction and remaining letters are free morphemes existent in the original word. This is true of ‘update’ in L5
which becomes ‘up’ in ‘Polyfilla’ and ‘date’ in ‘Space Sonnet’. Both the third and fourth effects rely upon illusion.
In the third, a word is divided so that both parts resemble morphemes. We can see this in the division of ‘remember’
in L10 into ‘re’ and ‘member’. Whilst re- is a commonplace prefix in English and member is a word, these are not
constituent morphemes of remember, which is in fact a simplex word. The fourth effect creates the illusion that the
fragment in ‘Polyfilla’ is a free morpheme, leaving incoherent letters in ‘Space Sonnet’, such as the extraction of
‘rat’ from ‘apparatus’ (L4). Moreover, although the fragment in ‘Polyfilla’ reads like a recognizable morpheme or
word (e.g., ‘rat’), the complex does not actually exist within the context of the original word. This is the most
common of Morgan’s techniques and as a result, we can even start to see themes emerging. For instance, in addition
to ‘rat’ (from ‘apparatus’) in L4, ‘ants’ (from ‘elephants’) in L13 and ‘ape’ (from ‘lapels’) in L14 all masquerade as
free morphemes from the semantic field of animals; in L7, a cluster of pronouns seems to arise (‘me’, ‘her’, ‘he’).
Across lines, we also find fragments that we’d expect to co-occur: ‘eve’ and ‘sin’ in L2 evoke the biblical myth
whilst ‘no’ and ‘way’ in L8 collocate as an emphatic interjection.

Ultimately, the fragments in ‘Polyfilla’ and the meanings they suggest to readers add another layer to the
poem. In doing so, they boost the effect of the poem as the direct voice of a troubled mind, struggling to make
meaning either in a disturbed state and/or under the interplanetary pressures of excess light on Mars.