Morphology

Chapter 3: Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes

Lexicon and grammar
• The word ACTORS can be analyzed into three morphemes: act, -or, -s
• These morphemes don’t have the same status and they don’t do the
same kind of job
• ACTORS can be analyzed as a grammatical word form of the lexeme
ACTOR. –s reflects the category of NUMBER and signals for the plural.
• ACTOR is itself related to the lexeme ACT; adding –or converts the
verb into a noun meaning “performed of the action mentioned”
Lexical and grammatical morphemes
• Grammatical morphemes never change the category of the word they
are attached to. They are markers of grammatical forms of some given
lexeme. For example, -ed in talked.
• Lexical morphemes may change the category of the word, like –ful in
spiteful as it changes a noun into an adjective. Sometimes, lexical
morphemes don’t change the category, such as in warmish as adding
–ish doesn’t change the adjective into another category.
• Another difference is that grammatical morphemes are in the most
part bound. Lexical morphemes may either be bound or free.
Lexical and grammatical morphemes
• Removing the grammatical morpheme doesn’t affect the lexical
meaning of the word. Removing the –s in actors gives a different
form, actor, of the lexeme ACT.
• Can you identify the grammatical morphemes in the following words:
Detective straightest threaded horsebox servant speeding

When a word contains both lexical and grammatical morphemes, their

order is fixed. Grammatical morphemes follow any lexical morphemes,
we have act-or-s and nothing like act-s-or.
Bound lexical morphemes
• Many of the morphemes you can identify by analysis are not
independent and are related in particular ways to the rest of the word
that they make up. That’s obvious for the grammatical morphemes that
we’ve met.
• Let’s now examine some lexemes which, for various reasons, are
harder to segment and interpret convincingly than most of those that
we’ve seen so far
Linguist utilize arrogant alacrity biology terrify location mechanic
democrat meditate
Bound lexical morphemes
• In the second place of each of these words we find a bound
derivational morpheme of the kind which signals membership of a
particular lexical category. In the first place they have a bound lexical
morpheme with a readily identifiable meaning.
• For example, LINGUIST contains the morpheme –IST in the second
place which forms nouns of the type X-IST meaning “person engaged in
a trade or profession involving X”. We are left with a bit vague
morpheme. RECEPTION-IST and HERBAL-IST have a clear and
recognizable word in the first place. It isn’t as clear with LINGUIST.
LINGU obviously has something to do with (BI-)LINGUAL and
LANGUAGE.
BOUND LEXICAL MORPHEMES
• We can similarly recognize –ANT and –ITY as bound morphemes
which are frequent adjective and noun forming elements as in
REPENTANT and SOLIDITY, built on REPENT and SOLID. But what are
ARROG- and ALACR-.
• All the other examples show the same pattern, one clear morpheme
and a bit left over. These bits of left overs are BOUND LEXICAL
MORPHEMES, because they can’t occur free and they always have
other morphemes attached.
Exercise
Identify the bound lexical morphemes in initial position in the following data. Can you
confidently say what they mean?
Histogram
bovine (compare equine, ovine, canine, feline)
Leucocyte
Medical
Android
Geriatric
Regulate
Horrify
theocracy
Solution
• HISTO-‘tissue’ in HISTOGRAM
• BOV- ‘cattle’ in BOVINE
• MEDIC- ‘to do with the healing arts’ in MEDICAL
• GER-‘old person’ in GERIATRIC
• HORR- ‘to do with fear and loathing’ in HORRIFY
• LEUCO- ‘white’ in LEUCOCYTE
• ANDR- ‘man’ in ANDROID
• REGUL- ‘rule’ in REGULATE
• THEO-‘god’ in THEOCRACY
Grammatical and lexical morphemes
• Grammatical: • Lexical:
• They DO NOT change the • May change the category
category of the word they of the word they are
are attached to. For attached to. For example:
example: box(es), wonder(ful), warm(ish),
walk(ing), long(er) king(dom)
• There are two types of • There are two types of
grammatical morphemes: lexical morphemes: bound
bound (inflectional) and (derivational) and free
free (functional) (open-class words)