Chapter 6: Morphology

Morphology

The type of exercise we have just performed is an example of investigating basic formsin language, known as morphology. This term, which literally means “the study of forms,”

Morphemes

English word forms such as talks, talker, talked and talking must consist of one element talk, and the other four elements -s, -er, -ed and -ing. All these elements are described as morphemes.

Free and Bound Morphemes

- Free morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words

  Ex: new, tour

- Bound morphemes, which are those forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s.

Lexical and Functional Morphemes

- Set of ordinary nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that carry the “content”  and “open” class of word called lexical morphemes.

- Articles, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns described as a “closed” class of words.

Derivational Morphemes

The set of affixes that make up the category of bound morphemes can also be divided into two types. These are derivational morphemes.

Inflectional Morphemes

Inflectional morphemes are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate the grammatical function of a word.

Morphological Description

Morphs, Allomorphs and Special Cases

- Phones as the actual phonetic realization of phonemes, so we can propose morphs as theactual forms used to realize morphemes.

- Just as we noted that there were “allophones” of a phoneme, so we can recognize the existence of allomorphs of a morpheme,

Other languages

Ganda

Kanuri

This first set of examples is from Kanuri, a language spoken in Nigeria.

Ilocano

When we look at Ilocano, a language of the Philippines, we find a quite different way of marking plurals.

Tagalog

Some examples from Tagalog, another language of the Philippines.