What is Morphology?

Morphology as a subbranch of linguistics deals

with the internal structure of words and their
interrelations:

mis understand ing He feels happy

Morphology syntax
What is Morphology?
BUT words are not the minimal units of word-building, as
the word itself can be divided into two parts ; one known as
the base or the root, and the other consists of the affix :

Base Affixes
• house • -s
• Move • -s
• Blind • -ly
• happy • -ness
 • can stand alone as words and are
• subdivided into two categories:
I. Free • lexical morphemes and functional morphemes.
morphemes

• called « content words » or «open ended class », are words which carry a certain
meaning. They enclose the major parts of speech:
• nouns as ‘lion’ and ‘car’, verbs as ‘think’ and ‘drive’, adjectives as ‘happy’ and thirsty’, and
1.Lexical adverbs such as ‘quickly’ and ‘briefly
morphemes

• called « closed class », include grammatical and function classes

• Conjunctions (and, but, so, although…),
• Articles and demonstratives (a, the, that…),
• Prepositions (to, at, for, with…),
2.Functional • Auxiliaries (must, would, might, can…)
morphemes • Pronouns (he, who, they, everybody…).
 II. Bound
• Affixes can either be derivational or
morphemes inflectional morphemes.

• often change the part of speech of the base

morpheme The suffixes –ness and –ation convert
1.Derivational the adjective ‘kind’ and the verb ‘consider’ into the
affixes nouns ‘kindness’ and ‘consideration’.
• BUT derivational prefixes do not all the time change the grammatical category when
attached to a root, because both ‘like’ and dislike’ are considered as verbs.

• do not change the part of speech of the base : they are only
used to show if a word is singular or plural, if it’s a past tense
2.Inflectional or present, or if it’s comparative form or not. They are rather
concerned with the grammatical function of a word as both
morphemes chair and chairs are nouns, both stop and stopped are verbs
and both tall and taller are adjectives.
Types of morphemes
INFLECTIONAL AFFIXES
 Multiple Affixation
NOTE : Sometimes more than one suffix is attached to
the base morpheme, most of the time, one is
derivational and the other is inflectional.
In such cases, a certain relative order is required, as
derivational affixes should precede inflectional ones:
Derivational and inflectional suffixes can have the
same form.
For example:
The progressive marker –ing which is an
inflectional suffix attached to verbs, may be used with
a verb to yield a noun and is then classified as
derivational:

He is writing  Inflectional
His writing (s)---  Derivational
MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Morphological operations define how words can be

modified by the addition of a new material or by the
change of the existing material.

To build words, morphological operations have to

manipulate base forms in various ways. This can be by
concatenating material or it can be achieved by non-
concatenation.
It can also be done with more complicated operations
such as substraction of material from the base.
 1.Concatenative processes 2.Non-concatenative processes

involve a linear combination of involve an internal alternation of

morphemes such as morphemes. morphemes or an introflection.
Concatenative VS non Concatenative
Operations
Thank you