MORPHOLOGY

MORPHOLOGY

Etymologically, Morph = form or shape, ology = study of. Morphology is the study of the basic building blocks of meaning in language. These building blocks, called morphemes, are the smallest units of form that bear meaning or have a grammatical function. Morphology is the study of word formation in a particular language. It focuses especially on the internal structure of the words and their alteration through the addition of prefixes and suffixes. 
   THE COMPOSITION OF WORD

Word-composition is a productive type of word-building, in which new words are produced by combining two or more stems. E.g.: campsite, bluebird, whitewash, in-laws, jumpsuit.
Type of words composition:

Composition:

·       Netral:

  *Simple

  *Derived

  *Contracted

·         Morphological

·         Syntactic     
 

MORPHEMES

Etymologicall, morpheme from the French, by analogy with phoneme, from the Greek, "shape, form”. The smallest functioning unit in the composition of words, and the minimal distinctive unit of grammar. Morphemes are commonly classified into free forms (morphemes which can occur as separate words) adn bound forms (morphemes which cannot so occur - mainly affixes). A further distinction may be made between lexical and grammatical morphemes; the former are morphemes used for the construction of new words in a language; the latter are morphemes used to express grammatical relationships between a word and its context. Words are not the most basic units of meaning. They are frequently composed of even more basic elements.

a. obvious: homework, dinnertime, moonlight, classroom

b. medium: fearless, quickly,

c. cult: walks, tenth, dog's, flipped,

The most basic elements of meaning are called morphemes. Each of the preceding examples contained at least 2 morphemes. We can take, for instance, "th" from "tenth" and say that it has a meaning all to itself { namely, "the ordinal numeral corresponding to the cardinal numeral I'm attached to"

dog   dogs

walk  walked

sad    sadly

If you were to look up these words in a dictionary you would not find them listed as eight separate words. You would find only four listings of the words in the first column, i.e. dog, walk, sad and run. The words in the second column would be shown within each listing as a variation of the listed word. For example, the word dog is used to mean a domesticated animal belonging to the same family as the fox, wolf and jackal. The word dogs would then be shown as the plural of dog, i.e. meaning more than one. Grammatically, then, words can be divided into smaller elements. In the example just discussed, one such element is dog and the other element is -s, which can be added to dog to make it plural. These smaller elements are known as morphemes.

In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest (and most naïve) form, this way of analyzing word forms treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement. More modern and sophisticated approaches (among them, Distributed Morphology) seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenative, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for Item-and-Arrangement theories and similar approaches.

Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms (cf. Beard 1995 for an overview and references):

Baudoin’s single morpheme hypothesis: Roots and affixes have the same status as morphemes.

Bloomfield’s sign base morpheme hypothesis: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.

Bloomfield’s lexical morpheme hypothesis: The morphemes, affixes and roots alike, are stored in the lexicon.

Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian. (cf. Bloomfield 1933 and Charles F. Hockett 1947). For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but it was not meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are meaning elements, not form elements. For him, there is a morpheme plural, with the allomorphs -s, -en, -ren etc. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, these two views are mixed in unsystematic ways, so that a writer may talk about "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s" in the same sentence, although these are different things.

Morphemes (bound or free) can be either content or function morphemes.

·         Content morphemes carry some semantic content

as opposed to performing a grammatical function.

For example car, -able, -un.

·         Function morphemes act solely to provide

grammatical information and syntactic agreement.

and, plural –s.

Note that these are not simply different names for the derivational/inflectional distinction { D/I morphemes are all bound, while content/function morphemes may be free as well (e.g, prepositions are free function morphemes).

A word can be analyzed as consisting of one morpheme (sad) or two or more morphemes (unluckily; compare luck, lucky, unlucky), each morpheme usually expressing a distinct meaning. When a morpheme is represented by a segment, that segment is a morph. If a morpheme can be represented by more than one morph, the morphs are allomorphs of the same morpheme: the prefixes in- (insane), il- (illegible), im- (impossible), ir- (irregular) are allomorphs of the same negative morpheme.

In addition to serving as resources in the creation of vocabulary, morphemes supply grammatical tags to words, helping us to identify on the basis of form the parts of speech of words in sentences we hear or read. For example, in the sentence Morphemes supply grammatical tags to words, the plural morpheme ending {-s} helps identify morphemes, tags, and words as nouns; the {-ical} ending underscores the adjectival relationship between grammatical and the following noun, tags, which it modifies.