What is Morphology?

G E N E R AL L I N G U I ST ICS
2018
 What is morphology?
The term morphology is generally attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who coined it early in the nineteenth century in a biological
context.

Its etymology is Greek: morph- means ‘shape, form’, and -ology which means ‘the study of something’.

Morphology is the study of form or forms.

In biology morphology refers to the study of the form and structure of organisms, and in geology it refers to
the study of the configuration and evolution of land forms.

In linguistics morphology refers to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of
linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed.
Morphemes
They are the smallest linguistic pieces with a grammatical function.
Morphologists investigate words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. They identify
and study morphemes.
A morpheme may consist of a word, such as hand, or a meaningful piece of a word, such as the –
ed of looked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts.
 Consider the following word…
Reconsideration
We can break it into three morphemes:
re-, consider, and -ation
re - consider - ation -s
Prefix The Stem Suffix Inflection

The stem is a base morpheme

The prefix is The suffix is also attached
to which another morphological
attached to the stem to the stem
piece is attached.

The stem can be simple, made up

of only one part, or complex,
itself made up of more than one
piece. In this case is simple.

It can also be considered the

root.
Parts of speech:
Main divisions of word classes :
Content Words Nouns
(Open classes) Verbs
(They carry the content of the word) Adjectives
(They are called lexical morphemes) Adverbs
________________________ _______________________
Function Words Conjunctions
(Closed classes) Prepositions
(They are called functional morphemes) Determiners
Pronouns
Within bound and free
morphemes we can also make
other distinctions!!
Inflectional and derivational morphemes
We can make a further distinction within the set of morphemes that are both bound and
grammatical. Bound grammatical morphemes (those that don’t have a sense by themselves and,
additionally, always occur in combinations) are commonly known as affixes. They can be further
divided into inflectional affixes and derivational affixes.
Here is some of the evidence for the distinction between inflectional and derivational affixes
 Inflectional affixes
English has only eight inflectional affixes:
{PLU} = plural Noun -s boys
{POSS} = possessive Noun -’s boy’s
{COMP} = comparative Adj -er older
{SUP} = superlative Adj -est oldest
{PRES} = present Verb -s walks
{PAST} past Verb -ed walked
{PAST PART} = past participle Verb -en driven
{PRES PART} = present participle Verb –ing driving
Derivational afixes in English
There are an indefinite number of derivational morphemes.
For example, the following are some derivational suffixes:
{ize} attaches to a noun and turns it into a verb: rubberize
{ize} also attaches to an adjective and turns it into a verb: normalize
{ful} attaches to a noun and turns it into an adjective: playful, helpful
{ly} attaches to an adjective and turns it into an adverb: grandly, proudly
A different {ly} attaches to a noun and changes it into an adjective: manly, friendly
English also has derivational prefixes, such as: {un}, {dis}, {a}, {anti}, all of which indicate some
kind of negation: unhappy, dislike, atypical, anti-aircraft.
Practical activities
Handouts
 Types of Word Formation
1. Coinage
2. Borrowing
3. Compounding
4. Blending
5. Clipping
6. Backformation
7. Conversion
8. Acronyms
9. Derivation (affixes):
Prefixation
Suffixation
Infixation
 AFFIXES

Infixes are segmental strings that do not attach to the

front or back of a word, but rather somewhere in the Circumfixes are affixes that come in two parts. One
middle. The Tagalog infix -um- is illustrated below attaches to the front of the word, and the other to the
(McCarthy and Prince 1993: 101–5; French 1988). It back.
creates an agent from a verb stem and appears before One example is Indonesian ke ... -an. It applies to the
the first vowel of the word stem besar ‘big’ to form a noun ke-besar-an meaning
Root -um- ‘bigness, greatness’ (MacDonald 1976: 63; Beard 1998:
(1) /sulat/ /s-um-ulat/ ‘one who wrote’ 62).
(2) /gradwet/ /gr-um-adwet/ ‘one who graduated’