Chapter Three Morphology

1. What is morphology?Morphology—the study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.e.g. unfriendly—un + friend + ly 2. MorphemesA morpheme—a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. unacceptable — un, accept, able

A morpheme cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or altering its meaning. e.g. kind kin + d; shout shou + tA word may consist of one or more than one morphemes. e.g., friend, friendly, friendliness, unfriendliness.2.1 Free morphemes1) A free morpheme—a morpheme which can stand by itself as a single word, e.g. dog, desk, out.

2) root and stemRoot — the morpheme that remains when all affixes are stripped from a complex word (p.337) or to that part of a word left when all its affixes are removed. e.g. unfriendliness has only one root friend. more than one roots. e.g. girlfriend is a free morpheme, but it has two roots—girl and friend.

stem— any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added. It may be the same as a root. e.g. in the word friends, friend is both the root and the stem. But a stem may also be different from a root in other cases. e.g. in the word friendships, friendship is its stem and friend is its root.

3) Lexical morphemes and functional morphemesLexical morphemes—morphemes which carry the content of messages. See examples on p.53. They are also called an open class of words because it is easy to add new words to this category. Functional morphemes—morphemes which have grammatical function. See examples on p.53. They are also called a closed class of words because it is not easy to add new words to this category.

2.2 Bound morphemesA bound morpheme—a morpheme which is never used alone but must be used with another morpheme, e.g. re-, -s, ness, less. Bound morphemes = affixes. 1) Prefixes, suffixes and infixes Prefixes are joined to the beginning of the root or stem (p.54). e.g. dislike, impossible, non-smoker.

Suffixes are joined to the end of the root or stem (p.54).e.g. brotherly, books.Infixes are inserted into other morphemes. (p.54). e.g. men, feet, ran. Infixes like this in English are actually internal inflection. Other examples of infixes can be found in some languages like Tagalog on p.54.

2) Derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemesA derivational morpheme—a morpheme that serves to derive a word of one class or meaning from a word of another class or meaning (p.329). Derivational morphemes often (not always) change the parts of speech of the root, e.g. nation—national; rich—enrich. But: take —retake; please—displease.

An inflectional morpheme—a morpheme that does not change the syntactic function/parts of speech of the root to which they are added, e.g. lesson—lessons; play—played. Inflectional morphemes typically indicate syntactic or semantic relations between different words in a sentence. e.g. the present tense morpheme -s in waits shows agreement with the subject of the verb.

Compared with other Indo-European languages, modern English has relatively few inflectional morphemes, including: a. the plural (-s)b. the third-person singular (-s)c. the -ing participle (-ing)d. the past form and past participle (-ed)e) the comparative (-er)f. the superlative (-est)g. the genitive case (‘s) (as in the girl’s picture)h. the feminine gender (-ess) (as in actress)

3) Some points to be noticed:a. The number of derivational morphemes is much larger than that of inflectional morphemes.b. A word may have only one derivational morpheme, but it can have more than one inflectional morphemesc. All the inflectional morphemes are suffixes but derivational morphemes may be either prefixes or suffixes.

d. If both derivational and inflectional morphemes occur together in a word, the derivational morpheme occurs next to the root, and the inflectional morpheme occurs at the end of the word. e.g. weaknesses—*weakesness—*weaksness. 3. Morphs and allomorphsphone, phoneme and allophonemorph, morpheme and allomorph

If morphs have the same meaning and a complementary distribution or if they stand in free variation, then they are said to be allomorphs of the same morpheme. e.g. (1) [-z] in dogs, [-s] in pests, [-iz] in houses, [-e-] in men, and [ø] in sheep are allomorphs of the plural morpheme {-s}. (2) –ion/-tion/-sion/-ation allomorphs of the same morpheme.

They do not differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound depending on the final phoneme of the proceeding verb. verbs ending with the sound /t/ usually take –ion (invent—invention)verbs ending with consonants other than /t/, take –tion (describe—description)verbs ending in –ify and –ize take –ation (justify—justification; modernize—modernization)verbs ending in –d, -de, or –mit, take –sion (expand—expansion; decide—decision; omit— omission).

Allomorphs also occur among prefixes. Their form then depends on the first letter of the word to which they will be added. e.g. in-, im-, ir-, il- are allomorphs of the morpheme of {in-}:im- occurs before p, b, or m (imperfect, imbalance, immobile); ir- occurs before r (irresponsible); il- occurs before l (illogical);in- occurs before all other consonants and vowels (inflexible, inexact).

4. Types of word formation4.1 CompoundingCompounding—formation of new words by combining two or more free morphemese.g. bedroom, babysit, carefree, throughout, a father-knows-best family, dead-end jobs, on-the-spot investigation, on-site service.

4.1.1 English compound words written in three different ways:1) As a single word—headache, sweetheart 2) With a hyphen in between—job-hunt, air-conditioning, self-government3) As two separate words—baby sitter, chain store, air force, women doctors, reading materialSometimes the same compound word may appear in three different forms, e.g. Airline, air-line, air line

Matchbox, match-box, match boxFlowerpot, flower-pot, flower potIn American English, compounds are usually written as a single word (solid) as soon as they have gained some permanent status; otherwise they are written as two separate words (open). In British English, however, compounds are usually written hyphenated.

4.1.2 Major types of compounds1) noun compoundsa. noun + noun: gaslight, teamboat, windmill, science fiction, moon walk, end product, peasant girl, pine treeb. verb + noun: pickpocket, callgirl, push-buttomc. adj + noun: deadline, blueprint, blackboardd. noun + verb: headache, heartbeat, daybreak, earthquake

e. ad + verb: outbreak, downfall2) verb compoundsa. verb + verb: sleepwalk, jumpstart, b. noun + verb: brainwash, bottle-feed, speed-read, mass produce, job-hop, hand-carry, house-keep, lip-read, baby-sitc. adj + verb: dry-clean, hard-boild. noun + noun: daydream, window-shop3) Adjective compounds

a. noun + adj: tax-free, fat-free, world-famous, shoulder-high, seasickb. adj + adj: wet-cold, light-blue, icy-coldc. ad + adj: over-cautious, all-roundd. adj +noun: high-grade, good-wille. noun + V-ed: town-bred, heartbroken, grief-stricken, homemadef. noun + V-ing: peaceloving, record-breaking, heartbreaking, fact-finding

g. adj/ad + V-ed/V-ing: fresh-frozen, dry-cleaned, widespread, well-dressed, well-meant, new-laid, easy-going, good-looking, everlasting4.1.3 Some points to be noticed: 1) When the two elements of the compound belong to one grammatical category, the compound will be in the same category, e.g. post box, blue-black, however.

2) When the two elements fall into different grammatical categories, the compound usually follows the grammatical category of the second element, e.g. head-strong, blacklist, pickpocket, undertake;Exception: downfall, breakneck 3) Compounds often have different stress patterns from the non-compound word sequences, e.g. ‘redcoat—red’coat, ‘greenhouse—green’house

4) The meaning of a compound, in most cases, is not the sum of the meanings of its parts. In other words, the meaning of a compound is often related to but cannot simply be inferred from the meaning of its parts, e.g. a darkroom (a room used for photographic processing) is not a just a dark room, since most dark rooms are not darkrooms. Other examples: typewriter, playboy, dog days, crybaby, bigwig, pigtail, greenroom, mother wit, homebird, bus girl, blue movies.

4.2 DerivationDerivation—a process of forming new words by adding affixes to other words or morphemes, e.g. insanity, unbelievable.1) Most prefixes in English change meaningThe prefixes modify the lexical meaning, but generally do not change the word-class, e.g. fair—unfair; lead—mislead; wife—ex-wife; legally—illegally. Other examples:mini-: minibus, miniskirt, minipants

mini-mini-skirt—a microskirtmaxiskirt—a long skirt that usually extends to the anklemidiskirt—a skirt that usually extends to the mid-halfmidicoat(中长大衣 ), maxicoat, mididressBut some prefixes in English change the word class: calm—becalm; danger—endanger; sleep—asleep; earth—unearth; fire—afire.

2) Most suffixes in English change the word-class of the worde.g. boy—boyish, brave— braveness. But some of them change the meaning instead of the word class of the original words. e.g. boy—boyhood; king—kingdom; ideal—idealism; friend—friendship; machine— machinery; book—booklet; London—Londoner; spoon—spoonful; music —musician.

4.3 Other ways of word formation 1) ConversionConversion—by converting words of one class to another class without adding any affixes, e.g.The trees fell down in the gale.The water flows down the slope.Let’s meet on the down platform.The workers downed their tools and started a strike.We all have our ups and downs.

Major types of conversion:a. Noun to Verb conversionShe wintered at her daughter’s home in the south.They are better housed than ever before.He mouthed fine words about friendship.b. Verb to Noun conversionAt present, we have too few people with this kind of skill mix.I can know him at once by his walk.There will be a repeat of the program next week.

This book is a must for the students of E.c. Adj to Noun conversionThis is a school for the deaf and the blind.He is at his best in his description of college life.d. Adj to Verb conversionThe photograph yellowed with age.Don’t dirty your handsNo garbage is to be emptied here.Other kinds of conversion:

I will take a through train. (prep—adj)He knows all the ins and outs of the whole business. (prep—n)His talks contains too many ifs and buts. (conj—n)They downed their tools in protest. (prep—v)We will have a face-to-face interview with the minister. (n—adj)

2) Backformation Backformation—by dropping an imagined affix from an already existing longer word. For example, the word televise comes from the word television, and not the other way round. That is to say, the noun television appeared first in the English vocabulary, and then the verb televise. e.g. babysit ← babysitter; merry-make ← merry-making; drowse ← drowsy Three types of backformation:

a. backformations from nounsbeg ← beggar; donate ← donation b. backformations from adjectivesgloom ← gloomy; cose ← cosy; laze ← lazy c. backformations from words ending with -ingair-condition ← air-conditioning3) ClippingClipping—by deleting one or more syllables from a word, e.g.

aeroplane → plane; gymnastics → gymFive types of clipping:a. front clipping bus, phone, quakeb. back clippingad, dorm, examhomosexual → homo; pornography→ porn; discotheque → disc; business → biz; gentleman → gentc. front and back clippinginfluenza → flu; detective → tec; prescription → script

d. phrase clippingdaily paper → daily; public house → pub; taximeter cab → taxi;popular music, concert, or record → pop permanent waves → perm zoological garden → zoo God be with you → goodbyeafter all is said and done → after alle. middle clippingbike, maths

doctor → Dr; mister →Mr; limited → Ltd4) BlendingBlending—by combining the meanings and sounds of two words, one of which or both of which are not in their full forms, e.g.communication + satellite → comsatTypes of blending:a. head + tailbreakfast + lunch → brunchmotor + hotel → motel airport + hotel → airtel

automobile + suicide →autocide smoke + fog → smog cafeteria + auditorium → cafetorium flash + blush → flushb. head + headteleprinter + exchange → telexpsychological + warfare → psywarAmerican + Indian → Amerind

high + technology → hi-techinternational + police → interpolsituation + comedy → sitcomhead + wordmedical + aid → medicaid; medicareEuropean + Asia → Eurasiantelevision + script → telescriptword + tailbook + automobile → bookmobile

work + welfare → workfarejazz + discotheque → jazzothequeprofit + toward → profitwardvideo + telephone→ videophone talk + marathon → Talkathon 5) AcronymAn acronym is pronounced as a word. e.g. NATO, UNESCO, TOEFL, laser, SARS.

6) Initialism An initialism is pronounced letter by letter, e.g. BBC, IT, ID, MA, BA, WTO, WWW (world wide web), IOC (International Olympic Committee).There are three types of initialisms:a. The letters represent full words.CIA—the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.SUN—the United Nations

b. The letters represent elements in a compound or just part of a word.ID—Identification (card)ETV—educational television TB—tuberculosisc. A letter represents the complete form of the first or the first two words, while the second word or the third word is in full form. e.g. H-bomb—hydrogen bomb

7) BorrowingBorrowing—the adoption of a linguistic expression from one language into another, usually when no terms exist for the new object, concept, or state of affairs.Words borrowed from Chinese: tea, taji, chow mien, wok, kung-fu, mahjong, silk, monk, mooncake, panda.Four types of loan-words

a. Aliens 外国词They are borrowed words which have retained their original pronunciation and spelling. These words are immediately recognizable as foreign in origin.e.g. Au pair(不付钱的相互交换服务 ); chauffeur ([‘uf] 汽车司机 ); sputnik

b. Denizens外来词They are words borrowed early in the past and now are well assimilated into the English language. Some of the words are so successfully assimilated that only trained professionals may be aware of their origin. Words of this group are early borrowings from Latin, Greek, French and Scandinavians. e.g. egg (Scandinavian); poor (French); event (Latin)

c. Loanblend混合借词They are words in which part of the form is native and part is borrowed, but the meaning is fully borrowed. e.g. Coconut, Chinatown.d. translation-loans译借词They are words and expressions formed from the existing material in the English language but modeled on the patterns taken from another language. (each morpheme or word is translated from the equivalent morpheme or word in another language)

mother tongue from lingua maternal (Latin)long time no see from 好久没见 (Chinese)paper tiger (Chinese)black humour from humour noir (French)found object from objet trouve 随手捡到之物 (French)

e. Semantic borrowings义借词Words of this category are not borrowed with reference to the form. But their meanings are borrowed (the meaning is borrowed, but the form is native ). Bridge is an English word, but when it refers to a type of card game, the meaning was borrowed from the Italian ponte. The English word artificial satellite is also a case of semantic borrowing from the Russian counteract sputnik