SUMMARY ON INTRODUCTION TO MORPHOLOGY

Jirahmae M Diasanta

Introduction to Morphology by The Linguistics Channel tells that morphology is a branch of

linguistics that deals with the structure and form of the words in a language. The speaker added that all

words can be divided into two categories: content words and function words. Content words are words

having a clear lexical meaning. This class is composed of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Content

words are considered as an open class because new words can be added to this category. Due to

technological changes, there are new added words such as, dumb phone and blog, shooties and jeggings,

Franken food or locavore, and defriend and tweets, and many more. On the other hand, function words do

not have clear lexical meaning but do serve a functional purpose in language. Examples for these words

are conjunctions, articles, prepositions, and pronouns. Function words are considered a closed class

because in general, we do not make additions to this category.

Moreover, he stated that many other words are made up of more than one piece, more than one

component, and these components are called morphemes. Morphemes are minimal unit of meaning. Some

morphemes can be used by themselves called, free morphemes. They’re not dependent on any other

morpheme to complete their meaning. Other morphemes cannot compete by themselves and are

dependent on other morphemes called, bound morphemes. Also, bound morphemes are divided into two

categories: affixes- the prefixes and suffixes that we add at the beginning or ending of a word- and roots.

Furthermore, affixes are divided into two categories, as well: derivational and inflectional.

Derivational are affixes that when added to a word, it will create a new word with a new meaning. It also

helps us to form the majority of the words that exist in a language. While, inflectional are affixes when

added to the end of the word don’t change its meaning or at least not any large sense. Instead, they change

things like the person tense and the number of a word. In conclusion, compared to other languages,

English has very few inflectional affixes but they serve their purpose well, nonetheless.
 REFLECTION ON THE VIDEO: INTRODUCTION TO MORPHOLOGY

Jirahmae M. Diasanta

The overall purpose of learning morphology is to understand language per se. In this extent,

students who are not totally familiar of some words but has affixes which are identifiable by them, then it

would be a great help to predict at some point. Studying morphology helps us to see how flexible

language is. Having a knowledge about this lesson can take an idea like the word “great”. This can

transform into words like, greatness, greatly, greater and greatest. Affixes can change meanings and this

will help us to express messages accurately and precisely.

Ultimately, being aware on the uses of morphology can help familiarize with lexical derivations

with morphemes. Being able to distinguish that a noun has “-ment” or “ness”, or a word with a suffix “-

ly” can form an adverb. Eventually, this enables us to realize that the English language has a

morphological procedure to follow in producing new words. These newly-produced words could be what

Chomsky’s words call, the transformational-generative morphology. This is the ability of humans in

producing and understanding words we’ve never heard before but we already understand it because of the

roots.

Finally, another aspect why people should learn the significance of morphology, is that it helps us

see on the other perspective of noticing the relation of English to other languages. We can notice that

some words have an origin in Latin, Greek, and French, helping us to understand when to use these words

based on the degree of formality and informality.

In conclusion, the essence of learning morphology is not only helping us to know

language differences but also, to be able to communicate to people successfully.