Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words are formed.

Morpheme is the minimal unit of meaning in word-building. It is a grammatical unit which cannot be further analyzed into meaningful parts. But be careful, morpheme and word is NOT the same. Words are not the basic meaningful elements in a language, since some words are formed by combining a number of distinct units of meaning. Some morphemes, such as pain in pain-ful or kneel-ing in kneel can stand alone as words which make sense. These are known as free morphemes. Theres also type of morphemes called bound morphemes. These are morphemes which have to be attached to other morphemes. Also, bound morphemes can be divided into three subgroups: 1) derived words, which contain a root and one or several affixes: hardship, unbelievable. 2) compound words, which consist of at least two root morphemes: handbag, merry-go-round. 3) compound derivatives, or derivational compounds, which are constituted by two or more roots modified by an affix: old-maidish, long-nosed. And remember few tips: Firstly bound morphemes are never words but always parts of words. Secondly most bound morphemes are affixes. Besides being bound or free, morphemes can also be classified as root, derivational, or inflectional. A root morpheme is the basic form to which other morphemes are attached. It provides the basic meaning of the word. Derivational morphemes are added to forms to create separate words: {-er} is a derivational suffix whose addition turns a verb into a noun, usually meaning the person or thing that performs the action denoted by the verb. For example, {drive}+{-er} creates driver, one of whose meanings is someone who

drives. It should be noted that ALL prefixes in English are derivational. However, suffixes may be either derivational or inflectional. Inflectional morphemes do not create separate words. They merely modify the word in which they occur in order to indicate grammatical properties such as plurality, as the {-s} of dogs does, or past tense, as the {ed} of lied does. There are a large number of derivational morphemes. In contrast, there are only eight "inflectional morphemes", and these are all suffixes. Affixes are classified according to whether they are attached before or after the form to which they are added. Prefixes are attached before and suffixes after. There are three levels of analysis of the morphological structure of the word. Morphemic analysis, which states the number of morphemes in a word and their types. At this level, the word friendliness, for instance, is characterized as a word containing three morphemes: one root morpheme (friend) and two derivational morphemes (ly, ness). 2. Derivational analysis, which reveals the pattern according to which the word is built. Thus, the word friendliness is built by adding to the stem friendly the suffix ness (not friend + liness as there is no suffix liness in English). Derivational analysis shows the structural correlation of the word with other words: friendly vs friendliness = happy vs happiness = easy vs easiness, etc.

3. Analysis into Immediate Constituents which reveals the history of the word, the stages of the process of its formation. The analysis is binary: at each stage we split the word into two constituents. Thus, the word friendlinessis first divided into friendly and ness, then the part friendly is further subdivided into friend and ly. This leads us to hierarchical structure of words. The way affixes are attached to words usually reflects hierarchical structure, in that certain affixes must be attached before others. Lets look at the word happinesses. The derivational suffix -ness, a nominalizer that forms a noun from an adjective, is attached to the root happy before the plural suffix -es. There is a reason why the morphemes occur in this order. The plural suffix attaches to nouns, not to adjectives (there is no word *happies). Thus -ness must be attached to happy to derive a noun before -es can be added. Linguists often use trees to represent hierarchical structure graphically. The fact that adjectives like happy combine with -ness to form nouns can be represented as follows: This tree shows that an A(djective) combines with a following suffix -ness to form a N(oun). The positions N, A, and -ness in the tree above are nodes; -ness is a terminal node, because it is an actual morpheme. The node N dominates the nodes A and ness ,it is above them in the tree, and they descend immediately from it. The A may be specified with a terminal node too. Here, A and -ness are sister nodes,

daughters of the mother node N. Here, the class of the word does not change with the addition of the suffix _ both girl and girls are nouns. Because plural -s is an inflectional morpheme, it does not change the category of the word to which it is attached. We know that the plural morpheme -(e)s is attached after -ness in happiness. We can represent this later attachment as follows: The noun happiness must be formed before the plural suffix es can be added. What about the word unhappinesses? Where should the extra morpheme un- be attached? To answer this question, think about how un- is used. Un- attaches to adjectives and verbs, not to nouns. So even though un- appears at the beginning of the noun unhappinesses, it must have first attached to the adjective happy (forming unhappy): Tree structures represent constituency. A constituent consists of all the elements dominated by a single node of a tree. Thus, un-, happy,-ness, and -es compose a constituent because all these elements are dominated by the highest (top) N in the tree. In (41), un-happy is a constituent, because un- and happy are both dominated by the highest A. Even though happiness is a word, it is not a constituent in (41), because there is no single node that dominates both happy and -ness and no other element. Exercise: This diagram shows un- attaching to a noun, and this is not correct, as we know, that un- attaches only to adjectives and verbs, but not nouns.