Qamar Khokhar BS English 3rd Semester

Lexis & Morphology

Lexis:
Total words in a language\Dictionary are called lexis.

Word:
A word is a combination of letters that make sence.

Etymology:
Etymology is the study of the origin of words and the way in which their
meanings have changed throughout history.

Neologism: Formation of New Words;

• Coinage (robotics, genocide, blog, Google) Due to revolution.

• Compounding (blackbird, blueberry, cellphone)

• Clipping (fan, phone, gym, lab, exam)

• Blending (brunch, motel, smog, webinar,)

• Abbreviations and Acronyms (PIN, CNIC, USA)

• Eponyms (Watt, Volt, Fahrenheit) By the name of Scientist

• Nonce-words (coined for one occasion, fantabulous)

• Borrowing (café, bunglow, cheetah) Come from another language

• Rhyming Compounds (Boogie Woogie, Georgie Porgie)

• Derivation (careful, faithless, mislead)

• Backformation (edit, donate, televise, opt)

• Onomatopoeia (buzz, hiss, crash, bang)

• Conversion of Syntactic Category (empty, butter, chair)

Qamar Khokhar BS English 3rd Semester

Morphology:
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words how they are formed, and their
relationship to other words is the same language. It analyzes the structure of
words and parts of words such as steams, root, prefixes, and suffixes.

Morpheme:
It is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning or grammatical
function. Morpheme can be a word or a part of a word that has meninges.
Each word must contain at least on morpheme. Morphemes cannot be divided
further into smaller meaningful units: they are the smallest ones.

Properties of Morpheme:
1. A morpheme is the smallest unit associated with a meaning. E.g. car,
care, carpet, cardigan, caress, cargo, caramel...
2. Morphemes are recyclable units. E.g. Morpheme care can be used to
form?
3. One way of finding out would be to test whether the remaining material
can be used in other words, i.e. whether it is another morpheme. In
Cardigan and Caramel, –digan and –amel do not meet our first definition
of a morpheme, they are not contributors of independent meanings, nor
are they recyclable in the way in which the morphemes care+ful,
un+care+ing, care+give+er are.
4. Morphemes must not be confused with syllables. A morpheme may be
represented by any number of syllables, though typically only one or
two, sometimes three or four.
5. Morphemes may be less than a syllable in length. Cars is one syllable,
but two morphemes.
6. Some of the longest morphemes tend to be names of places or rivers or
Native American nations, like Mississippi, Potawatomi and Cincinnati. In
the indigenous languages of America from which these names were
borrowed, the words were polymorphemic, but the information is
completely lost to most of native speakers of English.
Qamar Khokhar BS English 3rd Semester

Morph:
A morph is simply the phonetic representation of a morpheme, how the
morpheme is said.

Cats - '-s' morpheme is pronounced /s/

Dogs - '-s' morpheme is pronounced /z/

Houses - '-s' morpheme is pronounced / ɪz/

This /s/, /z/, /iz/ are the different sound of same morpheme {-s}.

1 morph 2 morphemes like People, Went because it has its plural form and
past participle.

Zero Morphemes:
The morpheme which has not phonetic representation is called zero
morphemes.

Allomorph:
Allomorph is the different pronunciation of the same morpheme.

Examples:

Stopped (ed) /t/

Enjoyed (ed) /d/

Wanted (ed) /Id/

Affixes:
Affix is a morpheme that is attached to the root to form a new word.

Prefix – added before the root

Suffix – added after the root

Infix – added in the root there are two conditions to use infix. Plural Formation
Ex. Foot=Feet, Mouse=Mice and In Irregular verbs Ex. Sing=Sang=Sung
Qamar Khokhar BS English 3rd Semester

Types of Morphemes:
There are two types of morphemes.

1. Free morphemes
2. Bound Morphemes

Free Morphemes:
A free morpheme is one that can stand alone with the specific meaning. There
are two types of free morphemes. Ex: Book, Table, Stand, bag etc.

1. Lexical Morphemes
2. Grammatical Morphemes

Lexical Morphemes:
Lexical morphemes are morphemes that carry the main messages we convey.
They are pictures or content words. These can be noun, verbs and adjective.
The lexical morphemes are of open class.

Grammatical Morphemes:
These are the grammar words. The grammar words are limited in every
language and they don’t change frequently. They act as a functional words in a
language mostly conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. It is of
closed class words.

Bound Morphemes:
Bound morpheme is one that cannot be stand alone with the meaning. It
always added to one or more morphemes to form a meaningful word. There
are two types of bound morphemes. Ex: Replay, Cheaply, Shorten, unable,
brighten, teacher etc.

1. Derivational morphemes
2. Inflectional morphemes
Qamar Khokhar BS English 3rd Semester

Inflectional Morpheme:
Inflectional morpheme changes the form but not the word class or the central
meaning of the word. We use suffix and infix rather than prefix.

There are 8 suffixes that we use in derivational morphemes.

1. Two are attached to nouns. (s) we use to make plural and (‘s) to show
Possession Like Qamar’s House
2. Two are attached to adjectives to make comparative (er) and superlative
(est) degree.
3. 4 are attached to verbs. Third person singular (s), Past tense (ed),
Present participle (ing), Past participle (3rd form)

Derivational Morpheme:
Derivational morphemes create a new word or mostly change the word
classes/identity/category.

Noun + Derivational Morpheme >>> Adj. Ex. Boy + ish

Verb + Derivational Morpheme >>> Noun Ex. clear + ance

Adj. + Derivational Morpheme >>> Adverb Ex. Exact + ly

Structure