Lin200 Morphology

A bound morpheme is one that can't stand on its own as a word: -s in dogs, -ed in kicked, dign- in dign-ity When writing a bound morpheme in isolation, use a hyphen to indicate where it attaches.

A bound morpheme

A free morpheme can appear as a word on its own: dog, kick, berry. In many languages free morphemes are rare; most words are polymorphemic. But in English free morphemes are very common.

A free morpheme

attaches to stems of a specific syntactic category and produces words of a specific category (often a different one!) • -ness attaches to adjectives and produces nouns: sad-ness, happi-ness, strange-ness, kind-ness • -able attaches to verbs and produces adjectives: wash-able, deni-able, fix-able, understand-able • -ly attaches to adjectives and produces adverbs: sad-ly, happi-ly, strange-ly, kind-ly • -tion attaches to verbs and produces nouns: act-ion, starv-ation, relat-ion, absorp-tion

A typical derivational affix

Acronyms: creating a word from the first letters or syllables of a phrase: radar comes from radio detection and ranging; scuba comes from self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Acronyms are relatively rare in English before the 20th century or so, though there are lots of fake etymologies claiming that various older words are acronyms.

Acronyms

because they are affixed before or after other morphemes. Prefixes are affixes that are attached before the root of the word they're in: e.g. re-, un-, anti-, mis-, as in re-send, un-happy, anti-virus, mis-understand. Suffixes are attached after the root: e.g., -ing, -able, -er, -ism in see-ing, read-able, sing-er, social-ism.

Affixes

creating a word by removing what looks like an affix from an existing word, even if it wasn't originally an affix. E.g., pea and cherry are derived from removing the final -s from pease and cherise:

Back Formation

Blending: creating a word by combining parts of two words: breakfast + lunch = brunch; smoke + fog = smog; chuckle + snort = chortle. They're also called portmanteau words, from a joke in Through the Looking-Glass.

Blending

shortening a word to the first syllable or two: advertisementàad, mathematicsàmath, professoràprof, etc.

Clipping

Words can also be created by compounding: combining two words into a single word with two separate roots, instead of just adding prefixes and suffixes to a single root. Noun+noun compounds in English are extremely common: battleship, smokestack, boyfriend, bedroom, ice cream, law school

Compounding

noun+verb: spoon-feed adjective+noun: bluebird noun+adjective: watertight adjective+verb: whitewash verb+preposition: walkup preposition+noun: underwater

Compounds of any syntactic category in english

the suffix -hood attaches to nouns to create sisterhood, fatherhood, knighthood; but it can't attach to all nouns: friendhood isn't a word. You can't necessarily create a noun meaning 'state of being X' for all nouns X, the way you can create a plural for all nouns using inflectional morphology.

Derivation isn't always productive

add them to a root to create a different word with a different meaning, or a different syntactic category. English has a wealth of derivational affixes: un-, -er, -ful, -ness, re-, -able, -ism, mis-, anti-, -ty, de-, -ment, etc.

Derivational affixes

These differences are because adding a derivational affix creates a new word, which can have its own independent meaning and grammatical properties, while adding an inflectional affix creates a different form of the same word.

Difference between Deri and infl

English only has about seven inflectional morphemes: • third-person singular present tense • past tense • progressive/present participle • passive/perfect participle • plural noun • comparative adjective • superlative adjective She wait-s. She wait-ed. She is wait-ing. She has eat-en the cookies. She has eaten the cookie-s. I am old-er than you. I am the old-est.

English Inflectional Morphemes

converting a proper name into a common word. E.g., sandwich is named for the Earl of Sandwich, who supposedly invented them; boycott is named for Charles Boycott, who was the target of one.

Eponyms

Function morphemes • have little or no specific referential meaning • usually embody structural or grammatical information about the content morphemes and their relationship to each other: -ness indicates a word is a noun; and connects phrases; etc. • sometimes modify or specify shades of meaning of content morphemes: -s means 'more than one'; -ed means 'in the past' • are a closed class: it's hard for speakers to create new function morphemes

Function morphemes

Sometimes it's easy: English doesn't allow a phrase consisting of two nouns, so if it's noun+noun, it must be a compound: caveman, action movie. What if it's a combination that could be either a phrase or a compound? • The compound's meaning may be less directly based on its components than a phrase's meaning. • Most compounds have primary stress on the first stem; phrases may be stressed on the second word.

How can you tell the difference between a compound and a two-word phrase?

it's a before consonants and an before vowels: a deer, a hawk, an elk, an owl A and an are just different ways of pronouncing the same morpheme— i.e., theyre allomorphs of each other.

Indefinite article - morpheme in english

Infixes are affixes that go within another morpheme, instead of before/after:

Infixes

Two basic categories of affixes: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional affixes mark different grammatical functions of a single word; • govern, governs, governed, and governing differ in inflectional suffixes. Derivational affixes create different words based on the same root. • govern, governor, and government differ in derivational suffixes. Inflectional affixes represent grammatical markers— encoding information about verb tense, number, gender, etc.

Inflection vs. derivation

A morpheme doesn't always have to have the same pronunciation, a single morpheme can be pronounced differently in different words ex: warm-th the [th] also used in tru-th

Morpheme Pronunciation

Morpheme is the smallest units of word structure: the smallest unit that affects a word's meaning or structural behaviour and cannot be divided into smaller structural parts

Morphemes

Morphemes can have any length and phonological shape: • one phoneme: -s, as in dog-s, cat-s, etc. • one syllable: un-, as above • two syllables: anti-, as in anti-freeze, anti-tank, etc. • many syllables: Madagascar, pumpernickel

Morphemes length and shape

The internal structure of words The study of these structural units, and how they combine to form words

Morphology

assigning an existing word to a new syntactic category— noun paper becomes a verb, as in They papered the walls. verb drink becomes a noun, as in I need a drink. adjective dirty becomes a verb, as in Don't dirty the floor. This is also known as zero derivation— it's like adding a derivational suffix, except the suffix is "zero" (i.e., not there).

Other methods of word formation: Conversion

• The -s that means 'plural noun' in dog-s, cat-s and the -s that means 'third- person singular verb' in walk-s, jog-s are different morphemes. • Although pump, -er, and nickel are all morphemes in English, pumpernickel doesn't contain any of them and is only one morpheme long.

Similar phonological shape

The same morpheme typically occurs in many words with the same meaning: ex: walk occurs in walk-ing, walk-er, walk-ed un occurs in un-desireable, un-likely, un-inspired, un-happy, un-sophisticated

The same morphemes

to represent this derivational structure

Tree Diagrams

Content morphemes (also called lexical morphemes): • have referential meaning: denote a thing, action, concept, quality, etc. dog, kick, purple, tennis, etc. • are an open class; i.e., new content morphemes can be invented easily: smurf, grok, captcha, skype...

Types of Morphemes: Content

Morphemes are defined by their contribution to meaning or structure.

What are morphemes defined by

Multiple pronunciations of a single morpheme - just as a phoneme may have multiple allophones in different contexts a morpheme may appear as different allomorphs in different contexts ex: leng-, wid-, dep-, streng- are allomorphs of long, wide, deep, strong.

allomorphs

i.e., a word consists of a sequence of morphemes one after another; morphemes don't interrupt each other or happen at the same time.

concatenative

In English, most content morphemes are probably free (e.g. dog) and most function morphemes are bound (e.g., -ed); but: The bound/free and content/function classifications are not the same: bound content morphemes exist (dign- in dignity; myst- in mystify) as do free function morphemes (the, of, be, a/an, etc.)

content vs free

• green house just means 'a house that is green', and is stressed on house; greenhouse is stressed on green and means 'glass-enclosed garden'. • wet suit means 'suit that is wet'; wetsuit means 'diving outfit'.

example

Onomatopoeia: creating a word to refer to and imitate some sound: buzz, hiss, beep, zip, etc.

onomatopoeia

A word can contain any number of morphemes • 1 morpheme: dog, water, Canada, tree, apricot, walk • 2 morph: tree-s,un-happy,walk-ing, sing-er, act-ive • 3 morphemes: hunt-er-s, act-iv-ate, thank-ful-ness • 4 morphemes: re-act-iv-ate, trans-form-ation-al

word can contain how many morphemes?