3.3.
2 Word Structure
Mr. Mohsin Zaheer
Lecturer: Abasyn University Islamabad Campus
Department of Management Sciences
3.3.2 Word Structure
• dividing up a complex word into its morphemes, it’s easy to get the impression that words are put
together like the beads that make up a necklace – one after the other in a line:
• (11) unhappiness = un + happy + ness
•But morphologists believe that words are more like onions than like necklaces:
•un + happy + ness
•look at the properties of prefix ‘un’ and suffix ‘ness’
cont…
• un- must first go on the base happy.
•Happy is an adjective, and un- attaches to adjectives but does not change their category.
•The suffix -ness attaches only to adjectives and makes them into nouns.
•So if un- attaches first to happy and -ness attaches next, the requirements of both affixes are met.
cont…
• In the other way around, -ness would have first created a noun, and then un- would be unable to
attach.
•the structure of a word like repurify
•the prefix re- attaches to verbs (e.g., reheat, rewash, or redo) but not to adjectives (*repure,
*rehappy) or to nouns (*rechair, *retruth).
• can say that the adjective pure must first be made into a verb by suffixing -ify, and only then can re-
attach to it.
Challenge
• Identify the rules of this word:
•Conventionalization
Answer:
• In English, the suffix -ize attaches to nouns or adjectives to form verbs.
•The suffix -ation attaches to verbs to form nouns.
•the suffix -al attaches to nouns to form adjectives.
•these suffixes can be attached in a recursive fashion:
•convene → convention → conventional → conventionalize → conventionalization.
3.3.3 What Do Affixes Mean?
• bound bases in some sense had more semantic meat to them than affixes did.
•In some cases, affixes seem to have not much meaning at all.
•the suffixes -(a)tion, -ment, and -al add much of any meaning at all
• . Similarly with -ity and -ness, these don’t carry much semantic weight of their own
cont…
• turning adjectives into nouns that mean something like ‘the abstract quality of X’, where X is the
base adjective. Affixes like these are sometimes called transpositional affixes, meaning that their
primary function is to change the category of their base without adding any extra meaning.
Kinds of Affixes
cont…
•• personal or participant affixes:
•These are affixes that create ‘people nouns’ either from verbs or from nouns.
•suffix -er which forms agent nouns (the ‘doer’ of the action) like writer or runner
•among this class of affixes are ones that create ‘people nouns’ other than the agent or the patient in
an event, for example, inhabitants of a place (like Manhattanite or Bostonian).
cont…
•• locative affixes:
•These are affixes that designate a place.
•For example, in English we can use the suffix -ery or -age to denote a place where something is done
or gathered
•(like eatery or orphanage).
cont…
• • abstract affixes:
•These are affixes that create abstract nouns that denote qualities (like happiness or purity) or
statuses (puppydom, advisorship, daddyhood) or even aspects of behavior (buffoonery).
cont…
•• negative and privative affixes:
•Negative affixes add the meaning ‘not’ to their base; examples in English are the prefixes un-, in-,
and non- (unhappy, inattentive, non-functional).
•Privative affixes mean something like ‘without X’; in English, the suffix -less (shoeless, hopeless) is a
privative suffix, and the prefix de- has a privative flavor as well (e.g., words like debug or debone
mean something like ‘cause to be without bugs/bones’).
cont…
• • prepositional/relational affixes:
•Prepositional/relational affixes often convey notions of space and/or time. Examples in English might
be prefixes like over- and out- or pre- and post- (overfill, overcoat, outrun, outhouse, preschool,
preheat, postwar, postdate).
cont…
•• quantitative affixes:
•These are affixes that have something to do with amount.
•In English we have affixes like -ful (handful, helpful) and multi- (multifaceted).
cont…
•• evaluative affixes:
•Evaluative affixes consist of diminutives, affixes that signal a smaller version of the base (e.g., in
English -let as in booklet or droplet),
•augmentatives, affixes that signal a bigger version of the base.
•augmentative affixes in English are prefixes like mega- (megastore, megabite).
cont…
• Diminutives and augmentatives frequently bear other nuances of meaning.
•For example, diminutives often convey affection, or endearment, as we find in some words with -y or -
ie
• in English (e.g., sweetie, kitty)
cont…
• Note that some semantically contentful affixes change syntactic category as well; for example, the
suffixes -er and -ee change verbs to nouns, and the prefix de- changes nouns to verbs.
•But semantically contentful affixes need not change syntactic category.
•The suffixes -hood and -dom, for example, do not (childhood, kingdom), and by and large prefixes in
English do not change syntactic category.
look more closely at the suffix -er in English
All of these words seem to be formed with the same suffix. Look at each group of words
cont…
•
cont…
• try to characterize what their meanings are. Does -er seem to have a consistent meaning?
• loaner is something which is loaned (often a car, in the US), and a fryer is something (typically a
chicken) which is meant to be fried. And the word diner in (d) denotes a location (a diner in the US is
a specific sort of restaurant).
cont…
• Some morphologists would argue that there are four separate suffixes in English, all with the form -
er.
•All of the forms derived with -er denote concrete nouns,
•either persons or things, related to their base verbs by participating in the action denoted by the verb,
although sometimes in different ways.
•A cluster of related meanings like that exhibited by -er is called affixal polysemy .
3.3.4 To Divide or Not to Divide?
• A Foray into Extenders, Formatives, Crans, and Other Messy Bits
cont…
• Consider the words in (18):
•(18)
•a. report, import, transport, deport, comport, export
•b. cranberry, huckleberry, raspberry
•c. Platonic, tobacconist, spasmodic, egotist
•d. sniffle, snort, snot, snout
•e. eggitarian, pizzatarian, pastatarian, fruitarian, flexitarian
The words in (18a) certainly look like they might be broken down because they have recurrent parts, but if they are morphemes, what do the pieces mean?
English has dozens of words that are similar to what we might call the -port family.
cont…
•
Challenge
• Do you think that units like -port, -mit, -ceive, and the like should be considered morphemes? If so,
what problems do they present for our definition of morpheme? If not, what should we do about the
intuition that native speakers of English have that such words are complex?
answer
• they are not native to English. They were borrowed from Latin (or from French, which in turn is
descended from Latin), where they did have clear meanings: -
•port comes from the verb portare ‘to carry’
•-mit from the verb mittere ‘to send’, -
• scribe from the verb scribere ‘to write’
cont…
• they seem to be independent and recombinable in some way, but that they are not morphemes in
the normal sense.
•Bauer, Lieber, and Plag (2013: 16) call elements like these formatives, which they define as
“elements contributing to the construction of words whose semantic unity or function is obscure or
dubious.”
cont…
• The items in (18b) illustrate a different type of formative that are sometimes called cran morphs,
from the first bit of the word cranberry.
•The second part of the word cranberry is clearly a free morpheme.
• when we break it off, what’s left is a piece that doesn’t seem to occur in other words (except in
recent years, words like cranapple that are part of product names), and doesn’t seem to mean
anything independently.
when break down we see that each one consists of two obvious morphemes plus an extra sound or two:
cont..
•
cont…
• The question is what the extra bit is. Is it part of the base of the word or part of the affix or part of
neither?
•It seems pretty clear that it doesn’t mean anything.
•/n/ in Platonic
•/od/ in spasmodic
•nothing between the base and the suffix in heroic
•/n/ in tobacconist
• /t/ in egotist
cont..
• we can at least give these puzzling bits a name. Following Bauer, Lieber, and Plag (2013), we will
call them extenders.
cont…
• 18d).
•These exhibit what is called sound symbolism.
•All of the words begin with the consonant cluster /sn/ and seem to have something to do with the
nose, but the sequence of sounds /sn/ doesn’t mean anything by itself.
•Here morphologists are relatively agreed that sound symbolic words cannot be broken into parts.
•if we were to segment /sn/ in the words in (18), what would be left over would neither have meaning
by itself nor recur elsewhere in English.
cont…
• (18e).
•In these examples, the first part of each word is clearly a free morpheme, but the second part is not.
•it is what Bauer, Lieber, and Plag (2013) call a splinter
•something which is split off from an original word, but which is not really (yet!) a true suffix.
•the splinter is tarian, which is a bit broken off from the word vegetarian, and then used to create new
words meaning ‘one who eats X’.
cont…
• English has lots of splinters, among them tastic, as in funktastic or fishtastic, which is used to form
mostly ironic words meaning ‘excellent or great in reference to X’, originally from fantastic
• licious, as in bagelicious or bootielicious, which is used to form words meaning ‘appealing in
reference to X’, originally from the word delicious.
cont…
• The difference between a splinter and a true suffix is that speakers understand splinters in relation
to the original word from which the ending splits off.
•If these bits survive and continue to give rise to new forms, though, they might someday be real
suffixes!
s
