Lecture VIII

Morphology

25th January 2008

Structure of the talk

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Definition of morphology

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The concept of the morpheme

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Free and bound morphemes

•

Representation of word structure

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Common morphological processes:

affixation, cliticisation, internal

change, suppletion, reduplication,

compounding, derivation

Definition of morphology

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Morphology – the analysis of word
structure.

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Words – the simplest free forms, i.e.
meaningful elements that can occur in
isolation and in different positions within
the sentence.

For instance: The table is black.
They’ve bought a glass table.
What did you buy? A table.

The morpheme

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The morpheme – the smallest unit

of language that carries information

about meaning or function.

•

Simple words – consist of one

morpheme, e.g. tall, build, furniture

•

Complex words – are composed of

at least two morphemes, e.g. driver,

tallest, impolite, Singabloodypour

Free and bound

morphemes

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A free morpheme is one that can be a

word by itself, e.g. class, like, polite

•

A bound morpheme has to be

attached to a word, e.g. – ify as in

classify, dis- as in dislike, im- as in

impolite.

•

Allomorphs – different phonetic

realisations of a morpheme, e.g. the

plural -s, the suffix -ed

Word structure

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Complex words are represented by tree
structures.

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The major components of complex words
are: the root and affixes.

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The root belongs to a lexical category: noun,
verb or adjective, etc.

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Base – the form to which an affix is attached.

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Pseudo-morphemes: receive, deceive,
complete, strike

Morphological processes

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Affixation: prefixes, suffixes, infixes.

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Prefixes are basically stress-neutral, i.e.
they don’t change stress-placement.

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Suffixes:

-

stress-neutral: -al,-able, -s, -ed, -ly, -ing

-

stress-attracting: -ese, eer, -ation, -esque,

-

stress-fixing: -ic,

Cliticisation

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Clitics – elements that cannot stand

alone for phonological reasons. They

are not syllables since they don’t

contain a vowel, e.g. ‘m, ‘s,

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Proclitics – are attached to the

beginning of a following word (not

attested in English)

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Enclitics – elements attached to the end

of a preceding word, e.g. I’m, He’s, etc.

Internal change

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Process that substitutes one morpheme

with another, e.g. irregular verb forms

go – went, take – took, spit – spat.

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Ablaut – vowel alterations that mark

grammatical differences

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Umlaut – the fronting of a vowel under

the influence of the front vowel in the

following syllable, e.g. foot – feet,

goose - geese

Suppletion

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A morphological process that
replaces a root morpheme with a
phonologically unrelated form to
indicate a grammatical contrast,
e.g. go – went, is – were, or jest –
być in Polish.

Reduplication

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Reduplication – consists in
duplicating all or part of the base.

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Full reduplication – the whole
base is duplicated, e.g. fajnie,
fajnie

Compounding

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Compouning – consists in combining
words belonging to the same or
different lexical categories:

-

two nouns: raincoat, drug addict,

-

adjective – noun: happy hour, bluebird,

-

verb – noun: swear words, washcloth,

-

preposition – noun:
overdose,underachiever