Morphology (1) (22-Jan-2004)

In linguistics, morphology (literally "study of forms") is the study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which they are formed. A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning (either a whole or part of a word), for example "uncertainty" breaks down into three morphemes: "un + certain + ty". Native speakers of a language have an intuitive sense of what derivational morphemes mean, and so can work out the likely meaning of words which they've never come across before, e.g. "unlaughable".

Some definitions:

There are two types of morpheme :

  1. a free morpheme is one that can stand on its own as a word e.g. "happy". Free morphemes can be either
    • lexical morphemes - open class words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives (open class means that new ones can easily be made up)
    • functional morphemes - closed class words such as conjunctions, prepositions ("on", "the", "him")

  2. a bound morpheme can only be used when it is attached to another morpheme, e.g. "un". Bound morphemes can be:
    • a root, which is a morpheme that cannot be broken into smaller parts, yet does not make a word on its own, for example the "ceive" in "receive", "perceive", "conceive" etc.. In many cases the derivation may be historical.

    • an affix which is attached to a stem to form a new word, e.g. "un" + "happy" makes "unhappy". Adding "ness" makes "unhappiness" (note that the same morpheme may not always be spelled the same way). Affixes in English may attach either to the front (prefix) or end (suffix) of a stem, and there are rules governing which end they can go. E.g. "happyun" won't work.

      Other languages have infixes, where an affix is inserted into the middle of a word. The nearest we get to this in English is in cases such as "abso-blooming-lutely", which is also known as a tmesis (means one word split by another). There are also circumfixes, e.g. in German, the past tense is indicated by adding "ge" to the start of a word and "t" to the end, as in "geliebt".

      Affixes are either

      • inflectional, which means that they don't create a new word, rather they are used to maintain the rules of syntax, e.g. the "ing" in "I am going". In English, these are always suffixes. Words created by inflectional affixes do not typically have their own entries in a dictionary, unless they are irregular, e.g. the past tense version of "sing" is not "singed", but "sang", and so will specifically be mentioned in a dictionary.
      • derivational, which means that they create new words, e.g. the "un" in "unusual". These may be prefixes or suffixes. Words created by derivational affixes typically have their own entries in a dictionary.

Some languages are polysynthetic where there are few (if any?) free morphemes and words are made up by combining many bound morphemes. Examples on sheet of Eskimo and Tiwi. On the other hand there are "isolating" languages with no affixes, such as Chinese.

Notes

How do we know if "tro" is a morpheme in "retroactive"?

We know that "re" is a morpheme: it usually means "again". If "tro" is a morpheme, it should combine with other stems like "re" does. We can find words that have "tro", e.g. "introspect". We know that "in" morpheme has a negative meaning, e.g. "invisible", "indifferent". So if "tro" is a morpheme, you'd expect "introspect" to mean "-ve trospect". But it doesn't, which suggests that the morpheme here is "intro", and that "tro" itself is not a morpheme. I.e. we use speaker's knowledge and intuition, and the break-down of "retroactive" is "retro+act+ive". Useful tests are therefore whether the putative morpheme is

  1. productive
  2. contributive
  3. has it got a grammatical function (e.g. turn adjective into adverb)

Useful book readings for this lecture:

Sounds, Grammar and Meaning page