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What is morphology?

Morphology refers to many things:

Structure of animals…

Or flowers…

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and the configuration of the earth…

But morphology in linguistics means study of the internal structure of

words and how are they formed.

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So, what’s a word?

Word have different meanings, it would be a sound or

a combination of sounds, or its representation in

writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates

a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of

a combination of morphemes1.

Every single language has words in it. Words have internal parts and

have grammatical functions, they have meaning also.

Lexemes

A lexeme is the minimal unit of language which involves a semantic

interpretation and a cultural concept.

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If you look up a word in a dictionary, you won’t search (for instance)

finds, found or finding, they’re forms of the English lexeme find. Of

course these words won’t be listed in the dictionary.

Words have structure:

Sounds

morphemes

words

phrases

sentences

A word is formed by roots, affixes, prefixes and suffixes, these are

called morphemes.

ROOT tie consider

free form free form

Germanic root Latinate root

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SOURCE Old English tygan, "to tie" Latin considerare, "to examine"

PREFIX retie reconsider

SUFFIX reties reconsiders

retying reconsideration

retyings reconsiderations

Morphemes are often defined as the smallest linguistic pieces with a

grammatical function and meaning. A morpheme may consist of a word

such hand, or it can be –ed from watched, it cannot be divided into

smaller parts.

What is the relationship between words and morphemes? It's only

one: a word is made up of one or more morphemes.

Affix is a morpheme that appears before or after the root word.

Preffix is a morpheme that appears at the beginning of the root word.

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Infixes are the morphemes that appear at the middle of the word.

They’re common in Cambodian, Sudanese and Sanskrit languages.

Simpler examples of infixes, like the insertion of Tagalog:

Bili

'buy' Binili 'bought'

Basa

'read' Binasa 'read' (past)

Sulat

'write' Sinulat 'wrote'

Suffix is a morpheme that appears at the end of the root word.

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For instance:

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Irregularities

Sometimes word formation involves rules. For instance, to create the plural of some nouns is added: –s, -es, -ves, etc. and for regular verbs is added: –ed to form the past tense.

Plural:

Fox – Foxes

Knife – Knives

Dog – Dogs

Past tense:

Watch – watched

Look – looked

Yet irrational combinatory nonsense of this type happens all the time in morphology. Consider the adjectival forms of the names of countries or regions in English. There are at least a half a dozen different endings

and also many variations in how much of the name of the country is retained before the ending is added:

-ese

Bhutanese, Chinese,

Guyanese, Japanese, Lebanese, Maltese, Portuguese, Taiwanese

-an African, Alaskan, American, Angolan, Cuban, Jamaican,

Mexican, Nicaraguan

-ian

Argentinian, Armenian, Australian, Brazilian,

Canadian, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Iranian, Jordanian, Palestinian,

Serbian

-ish Irish, British, Flemish,

Polish, Scottish, Swedish

-i Afghani, Iraqi, Israeli, Kuwaiti, Pakistani

-? French, German, Greek

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And it can't mix match stems and endings here: *Taiwanian, *Egyptese, and so on just don't work. 2

Derivational and Inflectional Morphology

Derivational

This one makes new words from other ones. It’s formed from create by

adding a morpheme that makes nouns out of (some) verbs. It involves also the creation of one lexeme from another one. Example: select – selector - selection

Some examples of derivational morphology

Nouns become nouns: Fish + ery Auto + biography

Verbs to verbs: Re + surface

Pre + register Un + tie

Adjectives to adjectives: Il +legible

Gray + ish Nouns to adjectives: Soul + ful

Poison + ous

Verbs to nouns: Digg +er Acquitt + al

Adjectives to adverbs: Sad + ly

Efficient + ly

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Inflectional

Inflectional morphemes express the grammatical features, as singular

and plural, present and past, and to indicate grammatical information. In

English these are suffixes only.

Example:

Nouns: Wombat-s

Ox + en

Verbs: brainwash-es

Dig-s

Escape-d

Rain-ing

Derivational Inflectional

-ation -s Plural

-ize -ed Past

-ic -ing Progressive

-y -er Comparative

-ous -est Superlative

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References

1 http://www.thefreedictionary.com/word

http://www.slideshare.net/moniozy/morphemes

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/morphology.html

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsA

Lexeme.htm

http://www.answers.com/topic/lexeme

Info. And samples

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2007/ling001/morpholog

y.html2