The Morphological Structure of Words

The concept of a word

The concept of a word has been rather difficult to define and there have been many different attempts to tackle it.

Some classical views state that words are units of sense, but this may not prove very helpful, since there are other segments that make sense, but which are made up of more than one word (proverbs: sleep as a log, make a storm in a teacup), and its not easy to determine boundaries of such segments. Therefore, a so-called potential pause criterion has been suggested to determine the boundaries of words, but it would be rather difficult to implement it, due to the need for very slow speech in such analysis.

Another definition states that words are the smallest units in language that can be used alone as a sentence.

Fire!

People. Wonderful.

This does rule out the usage of particular morphemes , or bits of words as a full-grown sentence, but should we then allow that elements such as the, his, my, of actually be recognized as words in English, given the fact that they cannot stand alone in sentences?

One other attempt at defining words was to see them as units that have a fixed internal structure.

The policeman coughed politely. Smaller elements which constitute this sentence cannot be rearranged in any way, nor can they be separated by other units. However, the factor of uninterruptability has a limited practical use. (abso-blooming-lutely).

Types of words in English

Simple words have a very simple morphological structure and are made up of one free morpheme to which an inflectional suffix can be added. (table, friend, books, nicer, smallest).

Complex (derived) words have at least one derivational affix as its immediate constituent. (help|less, lov|er).

Compound words are made up of two or more words. They are very frequent. (text|book, motherin-law, foot|ball play|er).

Compound-complex words (derivational compounds) are made up of one compound word and one derivational affix (out|sed|er, dry|clean|er, ex-house|wife).

Apart from simple words, all other words can be segmented into morphemes.

Bed|room

un|believ|able

nation|al|ize

Notice the difference between the linear (in nation + al + ize) and structural (in believe + able + un) attachment of affixes.

Affixes can have the same phonological form but different semantic functions:

1. Speak|er

2. tall|er

Due to the fact that the phonology of the two er affixes is the same, they are called homophones.

Also, we can have different sounding affixes which express the same or similar meaning:

Un|important

im|possible

dis|agreeable

In this case the prefixal morphemes are synonymous.

Allomorphs

The same morphemes do not necessarily have the same sound form; they change their phonological content depending on the context. Different forms of a morpheme which appear in different contexts are called morphemic variants.

courage courageous

/krid/ /kreid/

Such morphemic variants are always in complementary distribution, which means that only one variant appears in a certain context. These morphemic variants are called allomorphs. As seen in the example of /krid/ /kreid/ phonological similarity is not essential for morpheme membership. The explanations regarding morphemic variants within the synchronic approach belong to a branch of morphology called morphophonemics.