Morphology

Presented by:
Omitha Olga Linggalo (F21112251)
Fatahillah Syamsu (F21112300)
Muhammad Alwi (F21114002)

About Morphology
Morphology is the study of the internal
structure of words. Morphology in
linguistics, as the scientific study of forms
and structure of words in a language.
August Schleicher, a German linguist,
named Morphology as a sub-discipline of
linguistic for the first time in 1859.

Morpheme
About Morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit
in a language. In other words, it is the
smallest meaningful unit of a language.
A morpheme is composed by phoneme(s) and
by grapheme(s).

 A morpheme can be defined as a minimal unit

having more or less constant meaning and
more of less constant form. For example,
linguists say that the word 'buyers' is made up
of three morphemes {buy}+{er}+{s}. The
evidence for this is that each can occur in other
combinations of morphemes w ithout changing
its meaning. We can find {buy} in buying, buys,
and {er} in seller, fisher, as w ell as buyer. And
{s} can be found in boys, girls and dogs.

 Classification of Morphemes
Free and Bound Morpheme
A free or unbound morpheme is one that can stand
alone. Free morphemes, like town and dog, can appear
with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they
can stand alone.
A bound morpheme is a morpheme that appears only as
part of a larger word. Bound morphemes, appear only
together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound
morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes.
There are two classes of bound morphemes, inflectional
morphemes and derivational morphemes.

 Allomorphs
Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ
in pronunciation but are semantically identical.
For example, in English, a past tense morpheme is
-ed. It occurs in several allomorphs depending on
its phonological environment, assimilating voicing of
the previous segment or inserting a schwa when
following an alveolar stop:
as /t/ in verbs whose stem ends with voiceless phonemes
other than /t/, such as 'fished' /ft/
as /d/ in verbs whose stem ends voiced phonemes other
than /d/, such as 'buzzed' /bzd/

 Content Vs Function
Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or
content, while function morphemes have more of a
grammatical role.
The general rule to follow to determine the category of
a morpheme is:
Content morphemes include free morphemes that are nouns,
adverbs, adjective, and verbs. It also includes bound
morphemes that are bound roots and derivational affixes.
Function morphemes can be free morphemes that are
prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions.
Additionally, they can be bound morphemes that are
inflectional affixes.

Morphology Process
Compounding
Compounding can be used to form new words
through combining two stems as in the words
blackbird or housekeeper. Compounds can be
composed of many parts of speech. Some
examples include:

noun-noun such as horseshoe

noun- verb such as trouble-shoot
adjective-verb or high-jump
adjective-adjective such as bittersweet

 Affixation
Affixes are the bound morphemes which are added to base
forms of words. For example, the words "recover",
"discover", "covers" and "covered" all have been passed
through affixation process as they have been made from
adding the affixes "re-", "dis-", "-s" and "-ed" into the base
word "cover".
Some types of affixes:
Prefixes: affixes that are added in beginning of any root word are
called prefixes. For example, justice - unjustice, connect disconnect.
Suffixes: affixes that are added in end of any root word are called
suffixes. For example: fool - foolish, cat - cats.

 Suffixes: affixes that are added in end of any root word

are called suffixes. For example: fool - foolish, cat - cats.
Infixes: affixes which get added in mid part of a single
root word are called infixes. In Standard English
grammar, infixes do not exist.

Reduplication
Reduplication is a morphological process in which
a rootor stem or part of it is repeated. For example:
(Singular) pingan 'dish', (Plural) pingpingan 'dishes'
(Singular) talon 'field', (Plural) taltalon 'fields'