English Ed.

100
Morphology Notes
(Ms. Charito Barol-Sapong)

Two Classification of words:

a. Content word – has clear lexical meaning.
- Includes the open class words, because new words come from it, or
are added to this category.
- Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

b. Function word – does not have clear lexical meaning, but serves a functional
purpose of a language.
- Includes the closed class, because we do not make addition to this
category.
- Conjunctions, articles, prepositions and pronouns

Morphology - the study of structure and form of a word in a language.

Morpheme - a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.
Simple Words - words with only one morpheme
Complex - words with two or more morphemes;
- have a root and one or more affixes
Root - the core of the word in which there are no affixes attached.
Base (or stem) - the form to which an affix is added is called

Two Kinds of Morphemes:

1. Free morphemes – not dependent on any other morpheme for their meaning;
- includes both the content and function words.

2. Bound morphemes – cannot be used by themselves, and are dependent on other

morphemes.
a. Derivational – cause changes in meaning and form classes of words and/or
utterances. These include:
1. Negative marking affixes- dis-, im-, un-, in-, etc.
2. Size-marking affixes - -ine, -et, -ette
 3. Gender-marking affixes - -ess, -ienne, -ix, -ar,-or,-er, -ist
4. Noun-marking affixes – er, -or,
5. Verb-marking affixes - -en,
6. Adjective-marking affixes - -ic,
7. Adverb-marking affixes - -ly

c. inflectional – affixes that only change the person, tense and number of a word.
These include:
1. -s - kills 5. -s - toys
2. -ed – kissed 6. –‘s - Sam’s
3. -ing – dancing 7. -er - cooler
4. -en-fallen 8. -est -greatest

Types of Word Formation:

1. Derivation – a free and at least one bound morpheme ar e combined to form new lexical
category.
2. Compounding - the process of joining two or more words to form a new word; e.g.
raincoat, sky-blue, team-mate, or talking head.
3. Conversion - is a type of word formation when the function of a word changes (such as a
noun to a verb or vice versa), e.g. butter (N) – butter (V); walk (V) – walk (N) or open
(Adj) – open (V)
4. Clipping – is the reduction of a word into one of its component parts.
5. Blending – the process of combining two words to create a new word
6. Borrowing - words are borrowed from other languages
7. Coinage - totally new words can be invented
8. Acronym – the process of forming out the first letters