Morphology

tema1
A lexeme A lexeme is the fundamental
• Definition unit of the lexicon of a
language
• Is often--but not always--an individual Talk= talked, talks, talking
word or dictionary word, as it's
sometimes called)
• May have a number of inflectional
forms or grammatical variants
• Example
 Morphemes

2 For example, the

base of unwipe is
wipe, while the base
of McDonaldization is Too called morph
McDonald. The base
is frequently a free
morpheme

are new lexemes Are frequently

generated with characterized as the
prefixes and suffixes smallest linguistic
on a base elements

As we will see, certain A morpheme is a

morphemes have no word or a meaningful
solid or continuous portion of a word that
shape, while others cannot be broken
do not have meanings down into smaller
in the traditional meaningful bits, such
sense. as the -ed in gazed.

Morphemes have
also been defined as
a combination of
sound and meaning
 They carry They are
meanining by classified
their own, they • Lexical: They are Functional: They
are independent messages that we
don’t provide
say, they are free
• Example: Happy, morphemes that the meaning of
care, fortune They aren’t
carry the content of our expressions.
our utterances. words, they
They serve as a
They include: need to be with
nouns, verbs, gramatical role Example: Inflectional: You
a free Examples: Derivational:The
adjectives and connecting happyness, They are add a word, and
Morphemes adverbs 2. Bound morpheme to Plural(s, es, ies) y cahnge the Example: ilegal,
words together careful, classified in two they don’t
Free Morphemes make sense regular past meaning of a timeless,
within and misfortune, types change the
between form(ed, ied, d) Word
across quickly meaning.
themselves,
sentences. They
they are
include
dependent
prepotions,
conjuctions, and
articles
Inflectional morphemes
• Additive allomorphs
• Suppletive
Zero allomorphs
• In the light of this discussion, let us return to the earlier example of the
• allomorphs of the English regular past tense morpheme below:
• a. /id/ if the verb ends in/d or /t/
• e.g./mend/ ~ /mendid/ /peint/ ~ /peinted/
• ‘mend’ ‘mended’ ‘paint’ ‘painted’
• b. /d/ after a verb ending in any voiced sound except/d/
• e.g./kli:n/ ~ /kli:nd/ /wet/ ~ /weid/
• ‘clean’ ~ ‘cleaned’ ‘weigh’ ‘weighed’
• c. /t/ after a verb ending in any voiceless consonant other than /t/
• e.g./pa:k/ ~ /pa:kt/ /mis/ ~ /mist/
• ‘park’ ‘parked’ ‘miss’ ‘missed
Words
• Syntax: It refers to the structure of a language (SVO)
Example: I hit the ball
Semantics: It refersto the meaning of a language
Phonetics: It refers to the properties of sounds.s,z,t