MORPHOLOGY

 Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the structure of words. In English and many other languages, many words can be broken down into parts. For example:

• unhappiness               un-happi-ness

• horses                         horse-s

• walking                      walk-ing 

un -  carries a negative meaning 

ness - expresses a state or quality 

s - expresses plurality 

ing - conveys a sense of duration

A word like “yes”, however, has no internal grammatical structure. We can analyze the sounds, but none of them has any meaning in isolation.

• The smallest unit which has a meaning or grammatical function that words can be broken down into are known as morphemes.

So to be clear: “un” is a morpheme.

“yes” is also a morpheme, but also happens to be a word.

Every word has at least one free morpheme, which is referred to as the root, stem, or base.

We can further divide bound morphemes into three categories: 

• prefix              un-happy

• suffix               happi-ness

• infix                 abso-blooming-lutely

      The general term for all three is affix.

Morpheme:

• A sound-meaning unit

• A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function

• The level of language at which sound and meaning combine  

A. Free morpheme: lexical & functional morpheme 

Can be used as words by themselves, can occur by itself, not attached to other morphemes.

Examples: girl, teach, book, class, the, of, etc

Two kinds of free morpheme:

    a.  lexical morpheme (open class)

has lexical meaning; new examples can be freely added

             examples: N, Verb, Adj, Adv (content words)

    b.  functional morpheme (closed class)

new examples are rarely added (but not impossible to add)

examples: Pro, Prep, Conj, Art. (function words)

 B. Bound morpheme: derivational & inflectional    

 Morphemes that cannot stand alone (such as affixes), must be attached    to another morpheme

Two kinds of bound morpheme

 I. Derivational morpheme

A.    may change syntactic class

B.     to form new words

C.     examples: -able, un-, re-, etc.

II. Inflectional morpheme

Different forms of the same word

1. Not change syntactic class
2. Only 8 kinds in English: -’s, -s (plural nouns), -ing, -ed/-en, -est, -er, -s (S-V agreement)

Stem (root, base): the morpheme to which other morphemes are added

• free (e.g. teacher, dresses, unkind)

• Stem       : 1.  free (e.g. teacher, dresses, unkind)

                            2.  bound (e.g. inept, unkempt) 

A stem may contain more than one morpheme

“Cattiness”

  Root= cat

  Stem = catty (contains two morphemes= root and one affix)

  Second affix = “ness"

• Bound root-- root word that cannot stand alone (transfer, infer, confer, defer, prefer, etc.)

• Content morpheme-- morpheme with identifiable meaning or something that indicates a change in meaning

• Function morpheme-- serve a “function” in the sentence but not necessarily with an identifiable meaning

Diah Ayu Martiana

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