AN ASSIGNMENT ON

MORPHOLOGY

Submitted to

Dr. Rajni Singh.

Associate Professor, Department of English Literature and Language, Humanities Block, Indian School of Mines University, Dhanbad, Jharkhand.

Submitted by M.Phil English, Department of English Literature and Language, Humanities Block, Indian School of Mines University, Dhanbad, Jharkhand.

Sahel Md Delabul Hossain.

The term morphology is generally attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832), who coined it early in the nineteenth century in a biological context. Its etymology is Greek: morph- means shape, form, and morphology is the study of form or forms. In biology morphology refers to the study of the form and structure of organisms, and in geology it refers to the study of the configuration and evolution of land forms. In linguistics morphology refers to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context. Morphological

typology represents a method for classifying languages according to the ways by which morphemes are used in a language from the analytic that use only isolated morphemes, through the agglutinative and fissional that use bound morphemes (affixes), up to the polysynthetic, which compress lots of separate morphemes into single words. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, if not all, words can be related to other words by rules (grammars). For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related and differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", which is only found bound to nouns, and is never separate. Speakers of English recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats. Similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher, in one sense. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns, or regularities, in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages. Words are the source of information. Discussion of these types of information we will be in fact referring to each of the subfields of linguistics that is in the following discussion

PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY Phonetics is concerned with how sounds are produced; transmitted and perceived (we will only look at the production of sounds). Phonology is concerned with how sounds function in
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relation to each other in a language. In other words, phonetics is about sounds of language, phonology about sound systems of language. Phonetics is a descriptive tool necessary to the study of the phonological aspects of a language. Phonetics and phonology are worth studying for several reasons. One is that as all study of language, the study of phonology gives us insight into how the human mind works. Two more reasons are that the study of the phonetics of a foreign language gives us a much better ability both to hear and to correct mistakes that we make, and also to teach pronunciation of the foreign language (in this case English) to others. As phonetics and phonology both deal with sounds, and as English spelling and English pronunciation are two very different things, it is important that you keep in mind that we are not interested in letters here, but in sounds. For instance, English has not 5 or 6 but 20 different vowels, even if these vowels are all written by different combinations of 6 different letters, "a, e, i, o, u, y". The orthographic spelling of a word will be given in italics, e.g. please, and the phonetic transcription between square brackets [pli:z]. Thus the word please consists of three consonants, [p,l,z], and one vowel, [i:]. And sounds considered from the phonological point of view are put between slashes.

Lexical Structure information For every word we have learnt we intuitively know something about its internal structure. Our intuition tells us that the word tree cannot be broken down into any meaningful parts. In contrast the trees seem to be made up of two parts: the word tree plus an additional element s (plural ending). Morphology is the sub field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words and relationships among words.

Syntactic Information Froe every word we have learnt, we learn how it fits into the overall structure of the sentences in which it can be used. We know that the word reads can be used in a sentence like Mark reads the book, and the word readable can be used like The book is readable. Now read is a verb and readable is an adjective. But this distinction is only available with the only few speakers of English and the use also. Syntax is the sub field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of sentence and relationships among the internal part.

Semantic Information

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Semantics is the subs field of Linguistics that studies the nature and meaning of the individual words grouped into a phrase of sentences. Like the word brother means the male sibling in the family with relation to the female or other male siblings. But the word can be used instead for the word friend sometime though it does not mean to say the original meaning but to serve the purpose of the former one with more emphasise.

Pragmatic information I some cases, words seem to have a use but no meaning. For example the brother can be used like Oh brother! What a mess! Pragmatics is the subfield of linguistics that studies the use of words in actual context of discourse.

WORD FORMATION PROCESS Before the main topic begins, I would like to focus on the need of the study of Word Formation Process. New inventions and changes, every language is in need of new words borrowed, derived or otherwise formed simply because new things need new words. The human community is steadily growing and developing, just as the tool we use to communicate: Language. When new inventions and changes enter our lives, we are in the need of naming them and of course to communicate about them. Language is dynamic, it changes constantly. Inter alia because native speakers like to play with their language, or because there are no 'wrong' words. The key here is usage: If a new word, however silly it may be, is used by many speakers of a language, it will probably survive and it can happen that one day, it is an everyday word and entered our dictionaries. Especially in the last centuries, many word creations are spread amongst the language community. For example, if you take a look at the vast amount of new inventions made in the 20th and 21st century, it is obvious that the words we knew before were not enough to cover all these things. Exclusively in the 21st century, abbreviations were and still are everywhere, thanks to the internet (chat rooms and e-mail) and the cell phone (text messaging with its limited number of characters). And of course there are language trends that come and go as time passes, for example youth language or the formerly mentioned abbreviations in the so-called txt spk (language abbreviated to fit into text messages: cu, gr8, lol, etc.). There are old words with new meanings, like surf, bug and web, whose meanings have broadened since the new technological inventions, but there are many other ways in which new words are created: If there is a new thing and the language community has no word for it, there are several options to create a new one. In the past and the present, people used and still use a variety of
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methods to create new words, such as compounding, derivation or coinage. In the following, some of these word formation processes are illustrated and examples for their use are given.* (college slang: cool, chill, wasted Finegan 2007, 321)

Derivation Derivation, as ''the most common word formation process'' (Yule 2006, 57), builds new words by adding morphemes to stems. These morphemes are added to the target stem by affixation, through prefixes and suffixes. While prefixes like un- or dis- usually do not change the lexical category of a word, suffixes, such as -ness or -ation, usually do. If you take the examples happy unhappy and happy happiness, it is obvious that because of the suffix -ness the lexical category of happy has changed. The meaning is always slightly changed, but in a way that the final word is still closely related to the former word. In times of rapid changes in the world technology, new morphemes to describe new words rise, such as cyber- and nano. (Finnegan 2007)

Morpheme The smallest units of language that have a meaning or a grammatical function and form words or parts of words are called morphemes. In writing, individual morphemes are usually represented by their graphic form, or spelling; e.g., -es, -er, un-, re-; or by their graphic form between bracers, { }; e.g., {-es}, {-er}, {un-}, {re-}. The branch of linguistics in charge of studying the smallest meaningful units of language (i.e., morphemes), their different forms, the internal structure of words, and the processes and rules by which words are formed is called morphology.

Types of Morphemes Depending on the way morphemes occur in an utterance, they are grouped into two large groups: free morphemes and bound morphemes.

1. Free or independent morphemes are those morphemes which can occur alone as words and have a meaning or fulfil a grammatical function; e.g., man, run, and. There are two types of free morphemes. a. Lexical (content or referential) morphemes are free morphemes that have semantic content (or meaning) and usually refer to a thing, quality, state or action. For instance, in a language, these morphemes generally take the forms of nouns,
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verbs, adjectives and adverbs; e.g., dog, Peter, house, build, stay, happy, intelligent, quickly, always. Actually, lexical morphemes constitute the larger class of morphemes. They form the open class of words (or content words) in a language, i.e., a class of words likely to grow due to the incorporation of new members into it. b. Function (al) or grammatical morphemes are free morphemes which have little or no meaning on their own, but which show grammatical relationships in and between sentences. For instance, in a language, these morphemes are represented by prepositions, conjunctions, articles, demonstratives, auxiliary verbs, pronouns; e.g., with, but, the, this, can, who, me. It should be said that function words are almost always used in their unstressed form.

2. Bound (or dependent) morphemes are those morphemes which never occur alone as words but as parts of words; they must be attached to another morpheme (usually a free morpheme) in order to have a distinct meaning; e.g., -er in worker, -er in taller, -s in walks, -ed in passed, re- as in reappear, un- in unhappy, undo, -ness in readiness, able in adjustable; -ceive in conceive, receive, -tain in contain, obtain, etc. There are two types of bound morphemes: bound roots and affixes. a. Bound roots are those bound morphemes which have lexical meaning when they are attached to other bound morphemes to form content words; e.g., -ceive in receive, conceive; -tain in retain, contain; plac- in implacable, placate; cran- in b. Affixes is bound morphemes which are usually marginally attached to words and which change the meaning or function of those words; e.g., -ment in development, enin enlarge;s in Johns; -s in claps, -ing in studying, etc.

Classification of Morphemes

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Types of Affixes Affixes can be classified into two different ways: according to their position in the word and according to their function in a phrase or sentence. 1. According to their position in the word (or side of the word they are attached to), affixes are classified into prefixes, infixes and suffixes. a. Prefixes are bound morphemes that are added to the beginning of the word; e.g., un- in unnoticed, a- in amoral, sub- in subway, etc. Notice that prefixes are represented by the morphemes followed by a hyphen (-). b. Infixes are bound morphemes that are inserted within the words. There are no infixes in the English language, but in the languages such as Tagalog and Bontoc (in the Philippines), Infixes are represented by the morphemes preceded and followed by a hyphen; e.g., -um-. c. Suffixes are bound morphemes which are attached to the end of the word; e.g., - able in noticeable, -less in careless, -s in seeks, -en in shorten, etc. Notice that suffixes are represented by the morphemes preceded by a hyphen.

2. According to the function affixes fulfil in the language, affixes are classified into derivational affixes (derivational morphemes or derivations) and inflectional affixes (inflectional morphemes or inflections). a. Derivational affixes are morphemes that create (or derive) new words, usually by either changing the meaning and/or the part of speech (i.e., the syntactic category), or both, of the words they are attached to (Godby et al., 1982). In English, derivational morphemes can be either prefixes or suffixes. For example, un-+ happy (adj.) = unhappy (adj.); re-+ classify (v) = reclassify (v.); by-+ product (n.) = by-product. (See Appendix for a list of derivational prefixes and suffixes in English). b. Inflectional affixes, for their part, are morphemes which serve a purely grammatical function, such as referring to and giving extra linguistic information about the already existing meaning of a word (e.g., number, person, gender, case, etc.), expressing syntactic relations2 between words (e.g. possession, comparison), among others. For instance, the different forms of the verb speak are all considered to be verbs too, namely, speak, spoken, speaking. In a like manner, the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective strong are also adjectives, namely, stronger, strongest. In English, there are only eight inflections. They are -(e)s3 (third person singular marker of verbs in present tense), as in speaks, teaches; (e)s5 (regular plural marker) as in books, oranges; s (possessive marker) as in Johns house; -(e)d5 (regular past tense marker) as in helped, repeated; -en5 (past participle marker) as in
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spoken, eaten; -ing (present participle marker) as in eating, studying; -er (comparative marker) as in faster, happier; and -est (superlative marker) as in fastest, happiest. Affixes may also consist of supra segmental elements such as pitch or stress; in this case they are referred to as super fixes * (Lehmann, 1983).

Affixation Affixation consists in adding derivational affixes (i.e., prefixes, infixes and suffixes) to roots and stems to form new words. For example, if the suffix -able is added to the word pass, the word passable is created. Likewise, if to the word passable the prefix in- (or rather its allomorph im-) is attached, another word is formed, namely impassable. Affixation is a very common and productive morphological process in synthetic languages. In English, derivation is the form of affixation that yields new words.

Compounding Compounding consists in the combination of two or more (usually free) roots to form a new word. For example, the word blackboard, heartfelt, brother-in-law are compound words; they are made up of the roots (at the same time words themselves) black and board, heart and felt, brother, in and law, respectively. Compounding is a very common process in most languages of the world (especially among synthetic languages). In English, for instance, compound words have the following characteristics: 1. Compounds words behave grammatically and semantically as single words. 2. Since compound words behave as units, between their component elements no affixes (whether inflections or derivations) can usually occur; inflectional suffixes can appear only after compound words. For example, bathrooms, school, buses, water resistant. Exceptions: passersby, brothers-in-law, courts-martial. 3. Compound words can be written in three different ways: a. Open, i.e., with a space between the parts of the compound; e.g., toy store, diving board, flower pot. b. Hyphenated, i.e., with a hyphen (-) separating the elements of the compound; e.g., flower-pot, air-brake, she-pony. c. Solid, e.g., without a space or hyphen between the component elements of the compound; e.g., flowerpot, washrooms, pickpocket. Preference for a particular form of writing the compound word depends largely on lexicographical conventions and the variety of English use. For instance, hyphenation (i.e.,
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separating the elements of a compound with a hyphen) is more common in British English than in American English. In American English, the tendency is to write the compounds open or solid (varieties of the language when ad hoc pre-modifying compounds5 are used; e.g., a much needed rest; a state-of-the-art report. 4. The global meaning of the compound word can often be guessed from the individual meaning of each element of the compound. For example, a boathouse is a shed in which boats are stored; a bookstore is a store which sells books; and so on. But there are a few compound words whose global meanings have to be learned as if they were single words because such meanings cannot be guessed from the individual meanings of the component elements of the compounds. For instance, a Redcoat is a British soldier, not a coat that is red. Similarly, a flatfoot is a detective or policeman, a turncoat is a traitor, a hot dog is a kind of fast food, etc. 5. Compound words usually have the primary stress on the first element of the compound. 6. The second element of the compound usually determines the grammatical category to which the whole compound belongs. Following are a few possible combinations: n + n = n; e.g., sunrise, dancing girl, hand-shake, air-conditioning, cigar smoker, and windmill. Likewise the following are different types of combinations v+n adj. + n n + adj pron. + n prep. + v prep. + n adj. + adj However, there are some cases in which the headword does not determine the grammatical class of the compound; for example: n + v = adj.; e.g., man-eating, ocean-going, heartfelt. adj./adv. + v = adj.; e.g., hard-working, good-looking, dry-cleaned. n + prep. = n; e.g., passer-by, hanger-on. v + (adv.) prep. = n; e.g., show-off, holdup. v + adv. = n; e.g., have-not, get-together. 7. Compounding is a recursive process; i.e., one compound itself may become a constituent of a larger compound; e.g., lighthouse keeper, living-room furniture. **

Affixation (Subtype of Derivation) The most common type of derivation is the addition of one or more affixes to a root, as in the
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word derivation itself. This process is called affixation, a term which covers both prefixation and suffixation.

Blending Blending is one of the most beloved of word formation processes in English. It is especially creative in that speakers take two words and merge them based not on morpheme structure but on sound structure. The resulting words are called blends. Usually in word formation we combine roots or affixes along their edges: one morpheme comes to an end before the next one starts. For example, we form derivation out of the sequence of morphemes de+riv+at(e)+ion. One morpheme follows the next and each one has identifiable boundaries. The morphemes do not overlap. But in blending, part of one word is stitched onto another word, without any regard for where one morpheme ends and another begins. For example, the word swooshtika 'Nike swoosh as a logo symbolizing corporate power and hegemony' was formed from swoosh and swastika. The swoosh part remains whole and recognizable in the blend, but the tika part is not a morpheme, either in the word swastika or in the blend. The blend is a perfect merger of form, and also of content. The meaning contains an implicit analogy between the swastika and the swoosh, and thus conceptually blends them into one new kind of thing having properties of both, but also combined properties of neither source. The earliest blends in English only go back to the 19th century, with wordplay coinages by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky. For example, he introduced to the language slithy, formed from lithe and slimy. Some blends that have been around for quite a while and

include brunch (breakfast

and

lunch), motel (motor

hotel),electrocute (electric

execute), smog (smoke and fog) and cheeseburger (cheese and hamburger). These go back to the first half of the twentieth century. Others, such as stagflation (stagnation and inflation), spork (spoon and fork), and carjacking (car and hijacking) arose since the 1970s.

Clipping Clipping is a type of abbreviation of a word in which one part is 'clipped' off the rest, and the remaining word now means essentially the same thing as what the whole word means or meant. For example, the word rifle is a fairly modern clipping of an earlier compound rifle gun, meaning a gun with a rifled barrel. Rifled meant having a spiral groove causing the bullet to spin, and thus making it more accurate. Another clipping is burger, formed by clipping off the beginning of the word hamburger. (This clipping could only come about once hamburg+er was reanalyzed asham+burger.)
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Acronyms Acronyms are formed by taking the initial letters of a phrase and making a word out of it. The classical acronym is also pronounced as a word. Scuba was formed from self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Occasionally, not just letters but a whole or part syllable can be used in the formation of an acronym. Examples: radar - Radio Detection and Ranging These can be thought of as a special case of acronyms. Another special case is one in which the initial letters form the acronym, but they are still pronounced as letters rather than according to the rules of English spelling. Many organizations have names of this type. Examples: RAW: - Research Analyst Wing. IMF: - International Monetary Fund. RBI: - Reserve Bank of India. Memos email, and text messaging are modes of communication that give rise to both clippings and acronyms, since these word formation methods are designed to abbreviate.

Novel Creation In novel creation, a speaker or writer forms a word without starting from other morphemes. It is as if the word if formed out of 'whole cloth', without reusing any parts. Some examples of now-conventionalized words that were novel creations include blimp, googol (the mathematical term), bling, and possibly slang, which emerged in the last 200 years with no obvious etymology. Some novel creations seem to display 'sound symbolism', in which a word's phonological form suggests its meaning in some way. For example, the sound of the word bling seems to evoke heavy jewellery making noise.

Creative Respelling Sometimes words are formed by simply changing the spelling of a word that the speaker wants to relate to the new word. Product names most of the time involve creative respelling, such as Mr. Kleen.

Narrowing The use of word can narrow itself. The word meat one time in English meant any solid consumable food but now it is used to refer only to the edible flesh.

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Broadening Sometime the use of words can be broadened. In early days the word cool was used as to mean a special music composition known as Jazz but now it is used to mean anything that is convincible or as a symbol of acceptance.

Coinage Entirely new previously nonexistent words keep entering a language. This happens when speaker invent or coin a new word. For example we can say the word Tanglish came up from the idea of the language Tamil and English. Neither these have their complete meaning in the word Tanglish rather it is used to mean to a special type of language where people frequently mix both the Tamil and English to serve the purpose of communication.

Borrowing Borrowing occurs when an expression in one language is translated literally into another language. For example the food Biriyani dont have an exactly expression in English language therefore it acme to English as it is. This process is also known as Calques or Loan Translation.

Onomatopoeia Words felt to be suggestive of the sounds they refer to: bubble, burp, clatter, hiss, mutter, and splash.

Back-formation Back-formation is the process of deriving words by dropping what is thought to be a suffix or (occasionally) a prefix. It applies chiefly to the coining of verbs from nouns. Examples: abled (disabled), to explete (expletive), to enthuse (enthusiasm), to liase (liason); to burgle (burglary), to edit (edition, editor) etc.

Although it seems that the difference between morphological change of a word and creation of a new term is quite easy to perceive, there is sometimes a dispute as to whether blending is still a morphological change or making a new word. There are, of course, numerous word
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formation processes that do not arouse any controversies and are very similar in the majority of languages. One of the distinctive properties of human language is creativity, by which we mean the ability of native speakers of a language to produce and understand new forms in their language. Even though creativity is most apparent when it comes to sentence formation, it is also manifest in our lexical knowledge, where new words are added to our mental lexicon regularly. The above discussion is about the most comprehensive expositions of word formation processes that speakers of a language use regularly and unconsciously too to create new words in their language.

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References 1. Akmajian, A. Aichard, A Demers. Ann k Farmer. Robert M Harnnish. Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. New Delhi, Prentice Hall of India, 2008. 2. Aronoff, Mark. Kirsten Fudeman. Morphology and Morphological Analysis. London: Blackwell Publishers, 2009. (Soft Copy) 3. Article: - Word Formation Processes by Martina Wagner. 4. Article: - LING 301 Lexical Semantics by Ms Kraft. 5. **Soft Copy of Notes by Prof. Argenis A. Zapata, University of Los Angles. 6. Class Notes, Lecture on Morphology by Dr. Rajni Singh. (ISM, Dhanbad) Web References 1. 2. 3. 4. http://www.brainyquote.com/words/li/linguistics185148.html#BbaUuvowr2ags6sK.99 http://www.123helpme.com/ http://www.bookrags.com/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/

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