Morphology

Taken from Finegan, Chapter

2 (pages 46-52) Words and
their parts

The meaningful elements in a word are

called morphemes.
Most morphemes have what linguists
call lexical meaning, as with look, kite,
and tall. Other morphemes represent a
grammatical category or semantic
notion such as past tense (-ed in
looked) or plural (-s in kites) or
comparative degree (-er in taller).

For example:
true is a word with a single morpheme,
while untrue and truly contain two
morphemes each, and untruthfulness
contains fi ve (un- + true + -th + -ful +
-ness).

 Free morphemes can stand alone

as words

 Bound morphemes only function as

part of a word

 Bound morphemes can be

derivational or inflectional

 Derivational morphemes change

the category (e.g. dark-darken) of
the word or change the meaning of
the word (paint-repaint)

 Inflectional morphemes change

the form of a word but not its lexical
category or central meaning.
They do it to conform to different
roles in the sentence

Morphemes are ordered in

sequence

Affixes: prefixes (untrue) and

suffixes (happiness)
Infixes: inserted in another morpheme

Morphemes can be discontinuous

Circumfixes: a morpheme that occurs in
two parts, one on each side of a stem
Example: Samoan has a morpheme fe-/-ai,
meaning reciprocal: the verb to quarrel is fi
nau, and the verb to quarrel with each other is
fefi nauaife + finau + ai.

Interweaving morphemes: Muslim,

Islam, and salaam all contain the Arabic
root SLM, with its core meaning of
peace, submission.

Pormanteau words contain

merged morphemes
Its difficult to separate them.
Sometimes they are called blends.
Example:
smog (smoke and fog)

Morphemes are organized in a

layered structure

Types of morphological
systems in languages
Languages can be clasified in three
groups:
isolating
agglutinating,
inflectional.
Some languages are mixed in the
kinds of morphology they use.

Isolating languages
Example: Chinese
each word tends to be a single
isolated morpheme. An isolating
language lacks both derivational and
inflectional morphology.

Agglutinating languages
Example: Turkish
words can have several prefixes and
suffixes, but they are characteristically
distinct and readily segmented into
their partslike English announcement-s or pre-affirm-ed but unlike
sang (sing + past) or men (man +
plural).

Inflectional languages
Many languages have large
inventories of inflectional morphemes.
Finnish, Russian, and German
maintain elaborate inflectional
systems. By contrast, over the
centuries English has shed most of its
inflections, until today it has only
eight remaining onestwo on nouns,
four on verbs, and two on adjectives