UNIVERSITY GOCE DELCEV STIP FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY 1

Lecture 1 senior lector M.A. Kirova Snezana

DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR 3 LEVELS OF STRUCTURE: PHONOLOGY deals with the system of speech sounds employed by native speakers of English MORPHOLOGY deals with words and their meaningful parts

SYNTAX- treats the ways in which words are arranged to form sentences

English Morphology - Lecture 1

Morphology is the study of words, their internal structure and partially their meanings in individual units of language. It is concerned with the arrangement and relationships of the smallest meaningful units in a language. The smallest units that carry meaning or fulfill some grammatical function are called morphemes. (The term comes from the Greek word morphe, meaning shape or form.)

English Morphology - Lecture 1

Although at first thought the word may seem to be the basic unit of meaning, words like houseboat and playback clearly consist of more than one meaningful element. The word joyous consists of a base word joy and a suffix morpheme -ous, which means something like , "an adjective made from a noun". The verb sees consists of the base morpheme see and the third-person singular present indicative morpheme -s. The word unsightly consists of three morphemes: un-, sight, and -ly.

English Morphology - Lecture 1

Note that morphemes are not identical to syllables: the form don't has one syllable but two morphemes, do and not. So, any match between a syllable and a morpheme is accidental. Many polysyllabic words are monomorphemic: Wisconsin - 3 syllables, a single morpheme carpet 2 syllables, a single morpheme

English Morphology - Lecture 1

It is often useful to distinguish between free and bound morphemes. Free morphemes can be used alone as independent words - for example, take, for, each, the, panda (i.e. they can be uttered alone with meaning). Bound morphemes form words only when attached to at least one other morpheme; re-, dis-, un-, -ing, -ful, and -tion are all bound morphemes (i.e. they cannot be uttered alone with meaning). The most familiar bound morphemes are affixes (that is, prefixes and suffixes), but even bases/stems (forms to which affixes are attached) can be bound. An example of a bound base is the -cept of such words as except, accept, deceptive, and reception.

English Morphology - Lecture 1

The word reactivation has five morphemes in it (one free and four bound), as can be seen by analysing it step by step: re-activation activate-ion active-ate act-ive Thus the morphemes of this word are: free act and bound re-, -ive, -ate, and -ion.

English Morphology - Lecture 1

Morphemes stand in a particular relationship to each other one morpheme appears to be central, and one or more are peripheral and attached to the central one or to each other:

revitalized
central morpheme

re-, -ize, -d
peripheral morphemes

The central morpheme often happens to be a free morpheme. It is called the root and the peripheral morphemes are affixes. Affixes coming before the root are called prefixes and those after the root are suffixes.

English Morphology - Lecture 1

Affixes are always bound morphemes and, in English, roots are nearly always free. Affixes may be added directly to roots or to constructions consisting of root and one or more other morphemes. All these may be called stems. So, a stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added. friend-s friend-ship-s affix
stem=root affix central (root) bound

stem

English Morphology - Lecture 1

Affixes are differentiated according to their function: 1. Inflectional affixes (always suffixes in English) perform a grammatical function they represent grammatical categories (-s for plural of nouns, genitive of nouns, 3rd person sg. Present Tense; -ed for Past Tense; -ing for Present Participle; -er for Comparative of adjectives, etc.) 2. Derivational affixes may be prefixes or affixes in English and have lexical function they create new words out of existing words or morphemes by their addition.

Morphology Lecture 1
Derivational affixes can be of two kinds: Class changing change the word class of the word or morpheme to which they are attached nation + al = national

1orphology - Lecture 1 lish Morphology Lecture 1 (noun) (suffix) (adjective)

(verb) (prefix) (adjective) (adjective)

Class maintaining do not change the word class of the word or morpheme to which they are attached re-make = remake un-refined = unrefined
(prefix) (verb)

un success ful ly
(root)
derivational suffix

derivational suffix

class maintaining derivational prefix

Morphology Lecture 1

1orphology - Lecture 1 lish Morphology A morpheme may have more than one pronunciation or spelling. Variants of a morpheme Lecture 1 which occur in certain definable environments are
called allomorphs. For example, the regular noun plural ending has two spellings (-s and -es) and three pronunciations ([s] as in backs, [z] as in bags, [iz] as in watches). Each of the spoken variations is called an allomorph of the plural morpheme.

Morphology Lecture 1

1orphology Lecture 1 The allomorphs of a morpheme can be phonologically orMorphology morphologically conditioned. lish Lecture 1 for 1. Phonologically conditioned allomorphs
example, the regular noun plural ending s/-es has three pronunciations ([z], [s], [iz]) .
In this case, the conditioning factor is the phonetic nature of the preceding phonemes: [z] occurs after voiced sounds [s] occurs after voiceless sounds [iz] occurs after fricatives and affricates

Morphology Lecture 1

1orphology Lecture 1 2. Morphologically conditioned allomorphs for example, the plural of ox is oxen where [n] is an lish Morphology allomorph of the plural morpheme which is used with this root ox. There is nothing phonological Lecture 1 about this selection. The peculiarity rests in the
morpheme ox as a morpheme so the selection is morphologically conditioned. - Zero allomorph: the occurrence of the zero plural allomorph in a few fords such as: swine, deer, sheep trout, and others is determined by the fact that these special morphemes require a zero plural.

Morphology Lecture 1
-

1orphology Lecture 1 Replacive allomorphs: most of the allomorphs we have been dealing with, have been additive, that is, lish Morphology we have forming words by adding prefixes and suffixes to the basis. But there is another allomorph Lecture 1 of a different kind that is called the replacive
allomorph which can be illustrated by going back again to the past tense: sing-sang i-a (replacive allomorph) man- men a- e (replacive allomorph)