MORPHOLOGY

SESSION 1
● PHONOLOGY
● Basic terms:
○ Phone – an actual sound with no reference to class membership

○ Phoneme – a class of phonetically similar phones in complementary distribution

○ Allophones – the realizations of a phoneme

• MORPHOLOGY
• Basic terms:
• Morph – a cover term with no reference to class membership
• Morpheme – smallest meaningful unit of grammatical structure
– is identifiable from one word to another = form;
– contributes in some way to the meaning of the whole word = meaning;
– But! Meaning can be lexical or grammatical.
– e.g. care-less, help-ful-ness, un-read-able, en-large, news-paper, day-light, happi-ly
• Allomorph – the realizations of a morpheme
• Morphemes and words
– e.g. wait, wait-s, wait-ing, wait-ing area, waitr-ess

• Words can be:

• monomorphemic (consisting of just one morpheme);
• polymorphemic (consisting of more than one morpheme).
• e.g. car, finger, lady, long-ish, mind-ful, un-forgett-able, cheer-ful-ly,
cynosure
 help-ful-ness
free-bound-bound

• Types of morphemes (structural classification):

• free – they can stand on their own;
• bound – cannot be used on their own.
• e.g. read-able : leg-ible
• hear-ing : audi-ence
• en-large : magn-ify
• perform-ance : rend-ition
• white-ness : clar-ity
• dark-en : obfusc-ate
• seek-er : applic-ant
• Types of bound morphemes:
• derivational morphemes - when combined with a root,
they change the semantic meaning or the part of
speech of the affected word;
• e.g. happy – happi-ness;
• kind – un-kind
• inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect,
mood, person, number of a verb, or number, gender,
case of a noun, without affecting the word’s meaning or
part of speech.
• e.g. cat – cat-s, tiger – tigr-ess
• wait – wait-s – wait-ed – wait-ing
 un-help-ful-ness
prefix-root-suffix1-suffix2

• Types of morphemes (semantic classification):

• Roots - carry the most significant aspects
of semantic content and cannot be reduced into
smaller constituents
• Affixes, subdivided into:
• prefixes – they precede the root;
• suffixes – they follow the root.
• NB Affixes are necessarily bound and only root morphemes
can be free ≠ roots are always free.
• Compounds - words that contain more than
one root
• e.g. book-case, motor-bike, pen-knife, truck-driver, play-boy, black-
bird, air-bag.

• Morphemes and their allomorphs

• Cf. cats, dogs, horses
• - s suffix has 3 allomorphs: [s] (as in cats or lamps), [z] (as in dogs
or days), and [iz] or [əz] (as in horses or judges);
• But! He has 5 sheep. He caught 10 fish. - zero morph
• Humans have 2 feet. She is in love with 2 men. - mutation
• He has 4 wives. He has more than 100 knives. - voicing
• The farmer has 4 oxen. She has 10 cacti. They had to survive 2
crises. Monks are also called brethren. - foreign plural morphs
• The plural morpheme has many different realizations: -s; -en; zero
morpheme; mutation; voicing; different morphs for foreign plurals.
Free and Bound roots

Free roots:
Reopen, rewrite, redo

Bound roots:
Repeat, reduce
Bound roots = Cranberry morphemes

Lukewarm huckleberry
Cranberry gormless
Inept legible ‘leg’= ‘read’
Unkempt illegible

Strawberry, blueberry, blackberry

They derive only these words. They are bound roots because they
cannot stand alone as free morphemes and they do not occur as
affixes in other English words.
Free and bound morphemes

Free morphemes:
Lexical – they carry the content of the message: nouns, verbs, adjectives
Functional- these are the functional words: articles, pronouns, prepositions,
conjunctions
Adverbs ???
Bound morphemes:
Derivational – derive words with a different grammatical category
– nominal/ substantival- -dom, -ness, -hood, -ity, -er
- Adjectival- -ful, -less, -able, -ous
- Verbal - -en, -ify, --ise
- adverbial- -ly
Inflectional – give a grammatical function within the same category
Number (-s, -ren,), tense (-ed, -s, ), comparative degree (-er, -est), possession (s’ , ‘s )
Morphological description
Divide the sentences into morphemes and identify them:

The boy’s wildness shocked the teachers.

She is a loyal intelligent employee.

The new spring fashions are already delivered to the store.