Applied Linguistics - Unit 8 Morphology PDF

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Full summary on Unit 8 MORPHOLOGY - by Guy Cook...

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8- Morphology Morphemes The definition of a morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function For example: The police reopened the investigation The word reopened consists of three morphemes: open (one minimal unit of meaning) re (another minimal unit, meaning again) and ed (another minimal unit, indicating past tense) Free and bounded morpheme There are free morphemes that is morphemes which can stand by themselves as single words example; open and tour. There are also bound morphemes that is those which cannot normally stand alone but which are typically attached to another form for example re –ist-ed. When they are used with bound morphemes the basic word –form involved is technically known as the stem. For example Free morphemes We have 2 categories: The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which we think of as the words which carry the content of message we convey. These morphemes can also be called Lexical morphemes The second category consists of the functional words such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. Examples are: but, when, because, and, in, the, above

Bound morphemes The set of affixes which fall into the bound category can also be divided in two types. The derivational morphemes. These are used to make new words in the language and are often used to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. good (adjective) goodness (noun) The second set of bound morpheme contains what are called inflectional morphemes. These are used to produce new word in the English language, but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical functions of a word. play (present) played (past tense) table (singular) tables (plural) old and older (comparison) The difference between derivational and inflectional morpheme is worth emphasizing. As inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. For example both old and older are adjectives.

Morphological description Once you are familiarized with these new terms you can analyse sentences and identify the different elements, this process is the morphological description.

Morphs and allomorphs One way to treat differences in inflectional morphemes is by proposing variation in morphological realization rules. Morphs: These are the forms which realize morphemes cat (morph) ------------- (lexical morpheme) cats (morph)-----------(lexical and inflexional morphemes) Allmorphs: These are the different forms produced by the change of a form sheep (morph) --------- sheep (plural allophorm) cat (morph)-----------------cats (plural allomorph)...