Morphology

The Study of words

  The science of structure or forms in language
 Morphe in Greek means shape or form
 According to Oxford Dictionary:
Morphe +
logy
Etymology
1. (biology) the form and structure of animals and
plants, studied as a science

2. (linguistics) the forms of words, studied as a

branch of linguistics
  The smallest unit of meaning that a word
can be divided into/minimal units of
words that have a meaning and cannot be
subdivided further
Morpheme  Unwell- a combination of “un” and “well”
 Nonperishable- a combination of “non,”
“perish” and “able”
2 types Free morpheme Bound morpheme
of  Morphemes that
 Morphemes that
morphem can stand alone cannot stand alone,
es and still make they need to be
(Depending sense. attached to a free
upon whether a morpheme in order
 They have got to be a proper,
morpheme can meaning. meaningful word.
exist  Eat, drink, play
independently)  discontent
 Lexical/ Content Grammatical/
words Function words
 carry the content or the
meaning of a sentence.  Function words generally
perform some kind of
 Nouns, main verbs, grammatical role, carrying
2 types of free adjectives and adverbs are little meaning of their own
morpheme/wo usually content words.
 help us connect important
 They are open-class
rds words. Open classes
information
 Auxiliary verbs,
accept the addition of
new morphemes (words), pronouns, articles, and
through such processes as prepositions are usually
compounding, derivation, grammatical words.
inflection, coining, and  At/since
borrowing.
 Tree/flower
So
Far…
 Derivational Inflectional
morpheme morpheme
2 types of
Bound
morphemes  Tall- taller
(Depending on  Play-played
how they  Mind-mindful  Guitar-guitars
modify a root
Happy-  Read-reads
word)
happiness
  Adding a derivational morpheme
often changes the semantic
meaning or word class of the root
Derivational word to which it is added.
Morpheme-1
 Adding "ful" to the noun beauty
changes the word into an adjective
(beautiful)- (change in word class)
  It is true that derivational morphemes are used to
create words of different grammatical class from the
stem.
 Adjective “normal” becomes “normalize (verb) when
derivational bound morpheme “ize” is added
 Similarly we get mindfulness (noun), when “ness” is
Derivational added to mindful (adjective)
morpheme-2  However, some
derivational morphemes do
not change the grammatical
category of a word.
  the derivational prefix in-
 in inefficient,
 un- in undo,
 re- in rewrite,
Derivational
 dis- in dislike
Morpheme-3
 do not change the word class of the
derived words; efficient is an adjective
and the derived word inefficient is also
an adjective; do is a verb and the
derived word undo is also a verb
  an inflectional morpheme is a suffix that's
added to a word (a noun, verb, adjective or an
adverb) to assign a particular grammatical
property to that word, such as its tense,
number, possession, or comparison.
Inflectional  Unlike derivational morphemes, inflectional
morpheme morphemes do not change the essential
meaning or the grammatical category of a
word. Adjectives stay adjectives, nouns remain
nouns, and verbs stay verbs. For example, if
you add an -s to the noun carrot to show
plurality, carrot remains a noun. If you add -ed
to the verb walk to show past tense, walked is
still a verb.
8 types of
Inflectional
Morphemes
 Derivational Inflectional

Difference  to assign a particular

 often changes grammatical property
between to that word
Derivational the semantic  do not change the
and meaning or essential meaning or
the grammatical
Inflectional word class of category of a word
morphemes the root word  Suffixes (morphemes
added at the end of a
 Affixes word to form a
derivative)
  have phonological shape or physical structure
but do not contain any semantic content.

 have a form but no function.

 o in speedo meter

Empty  u in factual
Morphemes  fact= an idea or concept
 al= pertaining to/ related to

 Empty Morphemes should not be confused with

null or zero morphemes. While empty
morphemes have phonological shape and no
meaning, null morphemes have meaning but no
phonological shape.
  Null morphemes goes against the traditional definition of a
morpheme in linguistics, which says that a morpheme should be
“phonologically expressed.”

 Null morphemes are a special case of morphemes in linguistics

that have some meaning or semantic content, but do not have a
phonological shape or, in simple words, they cannot be
pronounced by the language speakers.
Zero or Null
Morpheme  In linguistics, a null morpheme is represented by the symbol Ø.

 For instance consider the plural morpheme (s) added to shirt. It

becomes shirts. Cot becomes cots when we add “s” to make its
plural form. But, consider the plural of sheep. The plural is also
sheep as word “sheep” gets attached to a null plural morpheme,
which changes the meaning, but doesn’t get expressed
phonologically