MORPHOLOGY

Introduction
Words we know form part of our linguistic knowledge (competence). Since each word
is a sound-meaning unit, each word is stored in our mental dictionary with its phonemic
representation, the phonological rules which when applied to the phonemic representation,
determine the pronunciation of the word and its meaning.

Each word must include other information as well. The dictionary representation of the
word must include whether it is a noun, verb, adj....., it must specify what grammatical
category or syntactic class it is.

OPEN/CLOSED classes of words:

In English, nouns, verbs, adverbs make up the largest part of its vocabulary. They are
called “open” classes because they have more or less independent meaning and it is very
common for new ones to be added to the lexical.
The other grammatical categories, prepositions, pronouns, articles, conjunctions and
forms indicating tense, number, gender, case...et are “closed” classes. It is not easy to think of
new prepositions or pronouns that have entered the language recently,
“Open” classes consist of lexical morphemes, whereas “closed” classes contain grammatical
morphemes.

MORPHEMES: Minimal meaningful units:

A B B =not A
1. desirable undesirable undesired +able
2. likely unlikely un + like+ly
3. happy unhappy un+happy
4. admired unadmired un+ admired

The meaning of the words in B consists of the meaning of the words in A the meaning NOT.
They consist of at least two or three minimal meaningful units that cannot be further divided
and they have a grammatical meaning. They are morphemes. Each single word may be
composed of one or more morphemes:

One morpheme: desire

Two morphemes‫؛‬ desire+able
Three morphemes‫؛‬ un+desire+able
Four morphemes: un+desire+able+ity
Five morphemes: un+gentle+man+li+ness
 So the morpheme may be defined as a minimal grammatical unit in which there is an
arbitrary union of sound and meaning, but they cannot be further divided or analyzed.

BOUND/FREE morphemes

un+like+ly un+desire+able gentle+ness

Some morphemes such as like, desire, gentle can constitute words by themselves.
They are called free morphemes. Other morphemes like the /un+/, /pre+/, /dis+/... and the
suffixes /+able/, /less/, /+est/, /+er/ ...cannot occur unattached, i.e. they are not words, but
always parts of words. They are called “bound” morphemes. The “bound” and “free”
morphemes varies from one language to another.

ROOTS, AFFIXES

Many words are formed by the addition of one or more grammatical morphemes to a
lexical morpheme. The verb ELECT that constitutes the core (heart) of
REELECTIONS is called a ROOT. Whereas the grammatical morphemes that are added to
the root to form a larger unit are called AFFIXES.

MAJOR SUBFIELDS

Grammatical morphemes are two types:

DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES: when these morphemes added to a lexical
morpheme a new word is formed.
INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES: are morphemes that denote tense, number,
gender, position, …et. They never change the grammatical category of the lexical morpheme
to which they are attached. They simply express its relation to other words in the sentence.

DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY

1. neighbor +hood 3. play+er

2. kataba kitab 4. act+or

Derivational formations involve the derivation of a form using derivational processes

such as affixation1,3,4) or vowel alternations (2). The form derived is not necessarily of the
same class as the root from which it is derive. Therefore, derivational formations are best
classified according to the classes of roots and derivations.

1. Class-maintaining-derivation: they do not cause a change in the grammatical class of the

root from which they are derived. The morpheme /+hood/ may be added to certain nouns
(neighbour, child, brother, mother), thus producing words (nouns) which are syntactically
similar to simple underived nouns.
Prefixes: re+write, auto+biography, urn-happy، semi+final, mono+graph, sub+conscious,
ex+change, a+moral….
Suffixes: morocc+an, music+cian, liberal+list ….
2. Class-changing-derivation:The morpheme /+er / agent morpheme is a class-changing
derivation suffix since when added to a verb we obtain a form of a different grammatical
syntactic class namely a noun.

B. INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY

Linguists have traditionally made a distinction between morphology, the combining of

morphemes into words, and syntax, the combination of words into sentences.

Some grammatical relations can be expressed either morphologically or syntactically.

Example:

morphologically Syntactically
The boy’s book is blue the book of the boy is blue
he loves books he is a lover of books