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Morphology (Structure of Words) : Home Homes, Homey

Morphology is the study of the internal structure and formation of words. It examines morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, and how they are combined through processes like inflection, derivation, compounding, and affixation. Languages vary in their degree of morphological complexity and whether they mark inflection through agglutination, fusion, or analytic constructions without affixes.

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87 views

Morphology (Structure of Words) : Home Homes, Homey

Morphology is the study of the internal structure and formation of words. It examines morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, and how they are combined through processes like inflection, derivation, compounding, and affixation. Languages vary in their degree of morphological complexity and whether they mark inflection through agglutination, fusion, or analytic constructions without affixes.

Uploaded by

noora
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Morphology (Structure of words)

 internal (syntagmatic) structure of word forms: singer, homeless vs. sing, home
 external (paradigmatic) relations of word forms: sing, sings, sang, sung, singing &
home homes, homey

Morph: concrete realization of a morpheme


free morph vs. bound morphs
bound morphs: must attach to a Base or can only occur with another bound morph
Affixes: pre-/suffixes /Infixes : un-happy, happy-ness, abso-bloody-lutely
Bound roots of Latin origin: approbe-, -ceive, -vert, -mit

Morphological process

via Inflection: add grammatical info to existing words (gender, number,case, tense, mood,
modality, aspect) e.g. sing, sings, sang, sung, singing,
inflectional affixes are always suffixes!

Inflections of English: plural -s, posessive -s, present tense 3rd sing. -s, past-tense/past-
participle -ed, -ing, comparitve degree -er, superlative degree -est

via Derivation: new lexical meaning e.g. read, readership, reader, re-read
word class changes: verb/noun
derivational affixes can also be prefixes!

Morphological Typology:
Analytic - low morpheme per word ratio; isolating; no inflection
Synthetic- high morpheme per word ratio; inflecting
-> Two types of synthetic languages: Agglutinating vs. Fusional (inflecting) - mark
inflection in contrast to analytic languages
-> Agglutinating: stringing together morphemes which have a single grammatical/semantic
meaning e.g Turkish
-> English is a fusional language (Old English: inflecting language)

Word formation(derivation) processes

1. Affixation
Prefixation
Infixation
Suffixation
Circumfixation
2. Reduplication: double the world fully/partly e.g very very bad, ex-ex wife
3. Reduction: examination- exam, microphone-mic, telephone-phone
4. Phonological modification: changing sound
Segmental: belief-believe, proof-prove
Suprasegmental: conVERT-CONvert, pushUP- PUSHup (verb-noun)
5. Suppletion: go-went (past); good-best (superlative); person-people (collective)
6. Zero affixation: bottle-bottle (noun-verb), sheep-sheep (sing-plural)
7. Compounding: blue book, red neck, singer-song writer, gas station
8. Blending: brunch (breakfast +lunch), sitcom (situation-comedy)
9. Backinformation: removes actual or supposed Affixes from a word, changes the part of
speech and the meaning, editor-edit, projection- project
10. Abbreviations: Acronyms UNESCO, AIDS, Laser
Initialisms: UK, CNN, BBC, USA
Mixed: CD-ROM, JPEG

Headedness:
in Compounds: typically right headed in English
N-V compounds babysit
V-N compounds pick-pocket, cry-baby
N-A compounds sugar-free,, knee-deep
Exocentric compounds: A+B denotes an unexpressed semantic head whose A is B e.g.
redneck (neck is red), white color (color is white) red-head (head is red)

Compounds: word or phrase formation: hot dog (compound) vs. hot dog (phrase)

Stress: (criterion to distinguish a compound from a phrase)


phonetic prominence, relational concept
-> duration, intensity/loudness/, pitch
-> consonants surrounding stressed vowels often more clearly pronounced
unstressed syllables have reduced vowels
-> Compound vs. phrasal stress: hot dog, hot dog
-> Nuclear stress rule (NSR) realized on the stressed syllalble of the phrase-final element

Portmanteau morpheme: morpheme that has several meanings simultaneously e.g. smog -
smoke & fog
Suppletive allomorph: morpheme appears in an alternative, not related form e.g. bad-worse

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