Structure of Words: MORPHOLOGY

Introduction to Linguistics Professor: Dr. Aida A. DianelaReporter: ALVIN T. VARGAS Sat. 7:30-10:30Structure of Words: MORPHOLOGY

WordsNotion of WordsStructure of WordsSimple wordsComplex wordsMorphemes, Allomorphs and MorphMorphemesAllomorphsMorphsMain Types of Morphemes According to OccurrenceFree MorphemesBound Morphemes

b. According to FunctionLexical MorphemesBound RootsDerivational Affixes

Grammatical MorphemesFree Grammatical MorphemesBound Grammatical MorphemesInflectional Affixes

CliticsEncliticsProclitics

D. Allomorphs and allomorph conditioningTypes of AllomorphPhonological allomorphsSuppletive allomorphs

Types of Conditioning factorsPhonological conditioningLexical conditioningMorphological conditioning

The boundaries of words in spoken utterances are not overtly marked, so we need criteria for their identification. We introduce the widely used notion of word as minimal free form. We also examine the internal structure of words, that is, how they can be divided into smaller meaningful units. The scientific investigation of this domain is called MORPHOLOGY.

Morphology is the study of word formation, of the structure of words.Some observations about words and their structure:

1. Some words can be divided into parts which still have meaning.2. Many words have meaning by themselves. But some words have meaning only when used with other words.3. Some of the parts into which words can be divided can stand alone as words. But others cannot.4. These word-parts that can occur only in combination must be combined in the correct way.5. Languages create new words systematically.

WordsNotion of WordsSpeakers generally have some notion of words in their language, and all languages probably have a word for word that is, a word that can translate word in some context.

Speakers of English generally have a good feel for how an utterance can be divided into words. This may seem trivial: surely words are the things that are separated by largish white spaces in writing. But this does not work smoothly. Ex. Bookcase and BookshelfChurch mouse and Churchman In speech we find no corresponding pauses between words - Ex. The farmer kills the duckling.Nevertheless, no speaker of English would have any doubt that there are five words in this sentence. No one would say that there is a word boundary between farm and erkills or between kill and s.

The farmerkills the duckling or The um: farmer kills um the duckling.The farmer kills the duckling.

Extension:Ex. The hairy farmer always kills all the little ducklings. De farmer kills de duckling / The farmer kills the duckring.

Words are thus minimal free forms: they have a degree of independence from other words in the sentence in the sense that they can be separated from them (free bit) and no smaller part of them has such freedom(minimal bit)

Structure of Words

Simple words - no internal structureEx. farm, kill, duckComplex words do have internal structureEx. farmer, kills, duckling

The pieces we have been talking about are minimal linguistic signs: they have a form and meaning, and cannot be divided into smaller linguistic signs. Such pieces are morphemes.

Morphemes are in a sense atomic signs: they cant be split up further.Simple words consist of a single morpheme; complex words of more than one morpheme.

Language differ vastly in terms of the word-complexity they permit.By comparison, words in Yupik (Eskimo, Aleut, Alaska) tend to be more complex, and often correspond to full sentences in English.

Ex. kaipiallrulliniuk means the two of them were apparently really hungry, and is made up of six morphemes.

Kai--pia- -llru- -llini- -u- -k-be; hungry--really- -past- -apparently- -statement- -they:two

Morphemes, Allomorphs and MorphMorphemes sometimes come in different phonological shapes. For instance, we identified a morpheme with the shape /z/ in kills, which indicates that a single person is doing the event now. For cat the corresponding form ends in /s/, and for touches, it ends in / z/. These variant forms are called allomorphs. Other allomorphs in English are /t/, /d/, and / d/ that are variant forms of the morpheme that attach to verbs and indicate past time.

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Ex. kissed /kIst/, killed /kIld/ and batted /bt d/, respectively.

AllomorphsMaybe complementary distribution Ex. / / and /n/ = a and an or free variationEx. exit as /gzIt/ and /ksIt/, and off as / :f/ and / f/.

eaec

MorphsSometimes used on analogy with phone in phonetics to refer to any meaningful form in a language. Some morphs are grouped together as allomorphs of a morpheme.

Ex. /z/, one going on nouns and specifying plural (more than one), as in dogs /d gz/, the other going on verbs, and indicating he, she or it is doing something.

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Main Types of MorphemesAccording to OccurrenceFree Morphemes a simple word consists of a single morpheme, and so is a free morpheme, a morpheme with the potential for independent occurrence. In The farmer kills the duckling, the free morphemes are the, farm, kill and duck.

Bound Morphemes by contrast, require the presence of another morpheme to make up a word; they cant occur independently. The morphs er, -s and ling in the given example are bound morphemes.

Other morphemes like ish, -ness, -ly, pre-, trans-, and un- are never words by themselves but are always parts of words. These affixes are bound morphemes. Prefixes occur before the morpheme, as in un-happy. Suffixes occur after a morpheme, as in friend-ly. A third type of bound morpheme is an infix, that goes inside another morpheme, as in 'absofreakinglutely' (some languages make more use of this than English). Collectively, suffixes, prefixes and infixes are called affixes.

According to FunctionLexical Morphemes are those like farm, kill, happy that convey the major content of a message, specifying the things, qualities and events spoken about. Words that have meaning by themselves are called lexical morphemes.

Bound Roots - Most roots in English are free however there exist a number which are always bound as they carry no meaning apart from the word in which they are found. (Ex. cranberry)There are other roots which are bound in the in certain contexts and free in others.(Ex. blackboard)

Derivational Affixes these are affixes that attach to a lexical root and result in a new word, a complex lexeme called stem. The suffix er / / in English is a derivational suffix. Adding it to a lexical root gives a stem with related meaning.

Ex. bake baker, boil boiler.

These suffixes do not only change the meaning of the morpheme they are attached to, they also change its part-of-speech.

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Ex. Noun Adjective Verb Noun Adjective Adverb boy + ish sing + er exact + ly

Noun Verb Adjective Noun Verb Adjectivevapor + ize free + dom read + ableSome derivational suffixes do not cause change in grammatical class.Ex. Noun Noun Verb Verb Adjective Adjective Friend + ship un + do pink + ish

Grammatical Morphemes Whereas lexical morphemes give the major meaning content of an utterance, grammatical morpheme mainly give information about the grammatical structure of the utterance, about how to put the content together to form a coherent whole.

Those words that function to specify the relationship between one lexical morpheme and anotherwords like at, in, on, -ed, -sare called grammatical morphemes.

Free Grammatical Morphemes - Words that can stand alone which (1) Signal grammatical & semantic roles & relationships; (2) Qualify or modify meaning (e.g., gender for pronouns) Articles, prepositions, conjunctions, disjunctions, pronouns

Ex. the, a an, to, of, by, for, and, but, his, her

Bound Grammatical Morphemes Suffixes that (1) indicate grammatical & semantic roles and relationships; and (2) Qualify or modify meaning.

Complete list:{-pl}: plural morpheme {-poss}: possessive{-3rd person sg. present} {-present participle}{-past participle} {-er comparative} higher{-est superlative} highest

Inflectional Affixes are bound morphemes that give grammatical information relevant to the interpretation of a sentence. They do not give rise to new lexical words, but to different forms of a single lexical word, different forms that are appropriate for the use of the lexical word in the sentence.

English has only eight inflectional affixes:{PLU} = plural Noun -s boys{POSS} = possessive Noun -s boys{COMP} = comparative Adj -er older{SUP} = superlative Adj -est oldest{PRES} = present Verb -s walks{PAST} past Verb -ed walked{PAST PART} = past participle Verb -en driven{PRES PART} = present participle Verb -ing driving

Clitics - Awordor part of a word that is structurally dependent on a neighboring word (itshost) and cannot stand on its own.

Not all bound grammatical morphemes are inflectional affixes. The bound form of have, written ve, as in Theyve broken in again is an example. Bound grammatical morphemes like this, which behave grammatically as separate word, but are phonologically part of the preceding word, are called enclitics. If they are part of the following word, they are called proclitics

The negative wordnotand a relatively small number of frequently occurring words (mostly verbs) can becontractedand attached to other words. Usually they are attached at the end asenclitics: she's(she isorshe has),don't(do not).

Occasionally they areproclitics:d'you(do you),'tis(it is). The combination of both types of cliticsappears in'tisn't.

Allomorphs and Allomorph conditioning Types of Allomorphs

Phonological allomorphs morphemes that are phonologically similar Ex. /s/ - /z/ - / z/ ( plural and possessive allomorphs)

Suppletive allomorphs morphemes that are quite different phonologically. Ex. good, better, best (The derived comparative and superlative forms of good with the regular derivational suffixes er and (e)st

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Types of Conditioning factors

Phonological conditioning ex. / / and /n/ = a and an (conditioned by the following phoneme)

Lexical conditioning ex. en, (in the past participle) -ed, (the form of the verb used after have and had. (the choice of allomorph depends on the particular word the morpheme is attached to.)

Morphological conditioning (Grammatical morphemes condition the presence of the allomorph.)

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There is no longest word in English

What is the longest word of the English language? Some have mentioned the following:(1) a. antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters) b. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious(34 letters) c. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (45 letters)

As it turns out, there is no longest word in English. To see this, consider simply the following two series, each of which can be continued without limit to create a potentially infinite number of new words:

antidisestablishmentarianismThe word construction is as followsestablish (9)to set up, put in place, or institute dis-establish(12)to end the established status of a body, in particular a church, given such status by law, such as theChurch of Englanddisestablish-ment (16)theseparation of church and stateanti-disestablishment (20)opposition to disestablishmentantidisestablishment-ary (23)of or pertaining to opposition to disestablishmentantidisestablishmentari-an (25)an opponent of disestablishmentantidisestablishmentarian-ism(28)the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment

SupercalifragilisticexpialidociousThe roots of the word have been defined as follows: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and docious- "educable", with the sum of these parts signifying roughly "Atoning for educability through delicate beauty." Although the word contains recognizable Englishmorphemes, it does not follow the rules of Englishmorphologyas a whole. The morpheme-isticis a suffix in English, whereas the morphemeex-is typically a prefix; so following normal English morphological rules, it would represent two words:supercalifragilisticandexpialidocious.

(2) a. great-grandmother b. great-great-grandmother c. great-great-great-grandmother

(3) a. sensation b. sensational c. sensationalize d. sensationalization e. sensationalizational f. sensationalizationalize

MORPHEMESBOUNDFREEFUNCTION OR GRAMMATICAL WORDSCONTENT OR LEXICAL WORDSROOTAFFIXDERIVATIONALINFLECTIONALPREFIXSUFFIX

SUFFIXConjunction (and)Preposition (in)Articles (the)Pronouns (she)Auxiliary verbs (is)

Nouns (girl)Adjectives (pretty)Verbs (give)Adverbs (easily)

-ceive-mit-fer

pre -un -con-

-ly-ist-ment

-ing -er -s-s -est -s-en-ed