MORPHOLOGY & ITS RELATED THEORIES

Basic concepts
Lecture 3 (chapter 4)
By:
Dr. Riaz-ud-Din
 AFFIXES
• Morphemes (meaningful)
• Inflectional & derivational morphemes
• Lexical morphemes (concrete meaning e.g.
wash, logic etc)
• Inflectional/derivational (Difficult to describe
e.g. –s in read-s, -m in insula-m; -al in logic-al &
natur-al
• Inflectional meaning is on the basis of
grammatical function (nom, acc etc.)
 Cont…
• Affix: main/long morpheme vs short
morpheme (read-s); meaning as rule
psychologically; cannot stand on its own.
• Suffix: ruk-a, event-ful
• Prefix: un-happy, in-valuable
• Infix: -t- in (i)s-t-gala from sagala
• Circumfix: ge-fahr-en from fahr
 Base, stem & root
• Base : Base is a the word form of a lexeme
e.g. read, it is also sometimes called as stem
in inflectional morphology.
• A base which cannot be further divided into
its constituent morphemes is called a root
e.g. read (here read is both a root & a base).
• A relative term: read, readable, readability
• Base is the triggering element (unit)
 Cont…
• Bound stem: Example: cat word form & cats
inflection (English)
• Gatt not a word form, gatt-o cat/a cat & gatt-
i cats
• Dubious/in between cases– not independent
but meaningful: see 2.8 & 2.9 (b), p. 21 (Bella
Coola language.
• Similarly in English bio & crat (see 2.10, p. 21)
 Morphemes & Allomorphs
• Affix allomorphy: e.g. cat-s, dog-z, fac-ez (a
single affix having more than one realizations
• Root allomorphs: sleep/slept, keep/kept.
• Stem allomorphy: see 2.12 a & b, p. 23
• Complementary Distribution
• Phonological allomorphs
• Morphophonological rules: Phonology
affecting morphology
 Cont…
• See 2.13-2.16, p. 24.
• Ease in pronunciation (cats vs catz & face vs
facz)
• Theoretical justification (morpheme vs word
form)
• Suppletive allomorphs : Go/went & good/better
• Stem suppletion: ur & va (Italian) grammatical
function.
 Cont…
• Weak & strong suppletion: buy/ bought &
good better
• Phonological conditioning
• Morphological conditioning
• Lexical conditioning (semantic explanation)
• Line of continuum
• Stem shape/affix shape.