morphology.doc

14/03/2011

Morphology

1. Word- a basic unit?

In some languages what appears to be single forms turns out to possess a large number of ‘word-like’ elements eg. Swahili

ni- ta-ku-penda

I will you love

We are looking for elements

It turns out from this example that there is a need to identify message elements rather than concentrate on word boundaries.

We want to look for forms.

2. Definition 

“A word is an arbitrary pairing of sounds and meaning”

A word includes the following information

·         pronunciation

·         speaking

·         meaning

·         parts of speech (syntactic category)

·         pragmatic information (if a word can be used in different context)

3. Classes of words

·         content word (open class)

·         function words (close class)

auxiliary (pomocniczy) helps to understand the meaning

She doesn’t like swimming.

Does- no meaning but helps us to understand

4. Morphology

The study of forms in linguistics is called morphology.

This term is also found in other branches of science, but in any of them it looks for certain ‘basic elements’ of the structure.

Morpheme- It’s a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function

For example:

·         Dissatisfied

-dis              -satisfi                            -ed

·         Unbelievable

-un              -believ –able

·         Unreservedly

-un              -reserv              -ed              -ly

·         Antidisestablishmentarianism

-anti              -dis              -establish              -ment              -arian              -ism

5. Morphemes-basic division

Morheme

Free                            Bound

Bound-cannot stand alone but are typically attached to another form eg. re-, -ist,-ed,-s

All affixes in English are bound morphemes

Free- they can stand by themselves as single words eg. open, tour

Stem

Un-dress-ed

Bound stem bound

Stem- when free morphemes are used with bound ones, the basic word-form involved is technically know as steam 

Dis-trust-ful

(steam)

6. Free steam vs. bound steam

Problems:

·         re-duce ≠

·         re-ject ≠

·         re-peat ≠

·         per-mit ≠

·         dis-gusted (there is no free morphine ‘gusted’) ≠

·         cran-berry ≠

·         luck-warm ≠

1)     momomorphemic

2)     bound-stem

7. Free morphemes

·         lexical (nouns, adjectives, verbs-they carry the content of messages they convey and we can add new lexical morphemes, so they are open class of words)

·         functional (conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns. They are closed class of words)

8. Bound morphemes

·         derivational (they are used to make new words in the language and are often used to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem) –ness stem good=goodness or careful careless (-ish, -ly, -ness, -ful, -ment) or (re-, pre-, ex-, dis-, co-, un-)

·         inflectional (they indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word). They show if a word is plural or singular, past tense or not, comparative or possessive noun) . English has only 8 inflectional morphemes.

-nouns-‘s, -s

-verb -ing, -en, -s, -ed

-adjective –er, -est

Excercises:

1)     The dishonest players cheated my beautiful girl.

2)     He has gleaned a few bits of information from overhearing various converations.

3)     John’s selfish attitude indicates a serious imbalance between their expenses and profits.

Pronouns- functional because you cannot add more

He has three cars.

He- functional and lexical

9. 2 interpretations:

Various- lexical (one word) or various- ious

10. Morphs and allomorphs (various of the same morphine)

Cat+ plural (s)                                                        ox+plural (en)

Sheep+plural (Ɵ)

Reduplication-repetition of the first part of the singular form (eg. bibi)