Introduction to Linguistics

Morphology
Focus:
- Internal structure of words: un-friend-ly, farm-er-s
- Rules of formation of words: unfriendly
o (*) unfriend, *lyunfriend, *likelyun
- Total list of words: lexicon
o What kind of rules account for structure of words?
o How is the lexicon organized?

Knowing a word:
- Form + meaning: cannot have one without the other (word with no form?)
o Word with no meaning? – “laptop” 30 years ago, “biketop” now; “fedeb” in
Hungarian
- Same meaning, different forms
o Sofa, couch, davenport (in American English)
- Same form, different meanings: bear (n), bear (v), bare → phonological form
Form:
- Phonological info: pronunciation
o Excluding: geographical names (Arkansas)
- Morphological info: structure
o un-friend-ly-ness
- Syntactic info: type of word – part of speech
o That book / man / house / idea is great / bad / nice / terrible.

Meaning:
- Semantic meaning:
o Basic meaning: He is my father.
o Broadened meaning: He is like a father to me.
 hungry for love
 digest an idea
- Pragmatic meaning: Oh, boy!
Categorizing words:
- Parts of speech / Grammatical category
- Words of same part of speech can replace each other
Parts of speech:
- Open class → content words
- Closed class → function words (grammatical words)
Content words:
- Nouns

1
Introduction to Linguistics

- Verbs
- Adjectives
- Adverbs
- Open class: new words can easily be added
Function words:
- Prepositions: in, after
- Determiners: this, that
- Conjunctions: and, but
- Articles: a, the
- Pronouns: he, her, themselves, each other
- Interjections: ouch! gee! wow!
- Closed class: new words rarely added
The structure of words:
- Units smaller than words have meanings
o Unfriendly is not the same as friendly → “un” has a meaning
- Morpheme: the smallest meaningful unit
o Can be 1 morpheme: a book, amoral
o Can be 1 syllable: girl, me, un-friend-ly
o Can be more than 1 syllable: Mississippi, finger, monster
- If it looks like a morpheme but it doesn’t have a meaning, it’s not a morpheme
Morphemes:
- Free: can stand by themselves (e.g. cat, race)
- Bound: cannot appear alone; affix
o Types of affixes:
 Prefixes: un-, dis-, re-
 Suffixes: -er, -ist, -s, -ing
 Infixes: only in “Expletive insertion” in English
Cranberry morphemes:
- Morphemes that are separable but don’t have meaning of their own
- Constitute an exception!
o Berry names: goose-berry, straw-berry, blue-berry, BUT cran-berry, huckle-
berry
o Latinate verbs: re-ceive, con-ceive, per-ceive

More terms:
- Root: free lexical item
o Morphologically complex words consist of a root and one or more affixes
- Stem
o When a root morpheme is combined with an affix
- Rules of word formation

2
Introduction to Linguistics

o Structure of words is rule governed:

 Ordering
 Un- attaches to adjectives
 - able attaches to transitive verbs
Kinds of affixes by function:
- Derivational morphemes
o Create a new word
o Often change grammatical class
o Although not always
o Vary in how productive they are
o Occur closer to the stem
- Inflectional morphemes
o Do not create new words, only add grammatical meaning
o Do not change grammatical class
o Very productive
o Occur at edges of words

New words in a language:

- Borrow from other languages
- Create: through word coinage
o Compounding
o Multi-word compound
o Acronyms
o Blends
o Back formation
o Clipping
o Folk etymology
o From names

Allomorphy:
- Morphemes have allomorphs
- English plural: spelled the same, but pronounced differently
- English prefix in-