Activity

Create as many words as you can:

The Structure of Words Word and Morpheme Classes Beyond Prefixes and Suffixes

Morphology is the study of words and their structure.

Words are meaningful linguistic units that can be combined to form phrases and sentences.

THE STRUCTURE OF WORDS

Words are not the smallest units of meaning. They may be simple or complex. Each of the words in compound and other smaller word parts which cannot be divided into even smaller parts is called a morpheme.

The friends promised to inquire carefully about a schoolmaster for the fair Bianca.

Free morphemes are words that can stand alone. They are lexical morphemes representing categories of words such as nouns (friend), verbs (promise), and adjectives (fair). Lexical morphemes refer to items, actions, attributes, and concepts that can be described with words or illustrated with pictures. Morphemes like -ed, -ly, and s are grammatical morphemes, which is used to signal the relationship between a word and the context in which it is used. Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness." They carry semantic information. Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on, without deriving a new word or a word in a new grammatical category (as in the "dog" morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme "-s" becomes "dogs"). They carry grammatical information.

antidisestablishmentarianism

WORD AND MORPHEME CLASSES

Homophones are pairs of words that sound alike but mean different things. (Example: fair fair, blue blue, light light)

The distribution of words

The types of sentences and phrases a word can occur in its distribution may also indicate its word class: (a) A _________ promises to inquire about a schoolmaster. (singular noun)

(b) A friend made a promise to the __________ Bianca. (adjective) (c) The schoolmaster made a promise __________ Bianca. (preposition

The use of certain types of grammatical morphemes can also be illustrated with sentence frames:
(a) The friend-___ inquire about Bianca. (plural form) (b) The friends inquire-___ yesterday. (past tense)

Derivational morphology
Morphemes like anti-, dis-, un-, -ment, -ful, and ly are derivational morphemes. Derivational morphemes are not required by the grammar in the same way that inflectional morphemes are; they increase the vocabulary and may allow speakers to convey their thoughts in a more interesting manner, but their occurrence is not related to sentence structure.

Open and closed classes

The classes of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are open, so they are also referred to as lexical content words. The classes of prepositions and determiners, for example, are closed classes. These classes are generally more grammatical than lexical.

BEYOND PREFIXES AND SUFFIXES

Words can be derived in other ways than by the single addition of prefixes and suffixes to the beginning or end of the stem. Infixes can be added within a stem, and other words can be derived without any affixation (addition of prefixes, suffixes, or infixes) at all.

Infixation
`Infixes are relatively rare in the languages of the world, and English does not have any ordinary grammatical morphemes that are infixed. However, there is a common English infix whose use is shown in the examples below:

absofuckinglutely Massafuckingchusetts morphofuckinglogical antidisestablishmentfuckingtarianism

Compounding
A more familiar morphological process that builds new words is compounding, the formation of words like schoolmaster. Compare the compounds in the first column with the phrases in the second column:

blackbird redwood hotdog whitecap Deadhead

black bird red wood hot dog white cap dead head

Reduplication
Reduplication is a process by which all or part of a word is copied or duplicated to indicate a change in meaning or usage. The Lakhota words in the first column are used with singular subjects, while those in the second column are used with plural subjects:
gi ska sha tho zi gigi skaska shasha thotho zizi to be rusty brown to be white to be red to be blue or green to be yellow

Ablaut
Ablaut is another type of morphological change that does not involve the addition of affixes. It is the change from one sound to a related one to express change in meaning. The term ablaut is usually used to refer changes in vowels:
swear swore, see saw, run ran, fight fought (tense of a verb, irregular) mouse mice, tooth teeth, man men (form of a noun, irregular)

How many morphemes are there?

antidisestablishmentfuckingtarianism

Sole DEO Gloria!