Learning Outcomes

After studying this chapter, you should be able to discuss:

• the definition of morphology
• the difference between a word, a morpheme, and an allomorph and the characteristics of each
• the difference between derivational and inflectional morphology
• the different ways words can be created
• the process of morphological analysis

What is Morphology?

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. The claim that words have structure implies that we have a precise idea about the nature of words. However, this chapter shows that the study of words is not that simple.

Words

What’s a word?  It seems almost silly to ask such a simple question, but if you think about it, the question doesn’t have an obvious answer. A famous linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure said that a word is like a coin because it has two sides to it that can never be separated. One side of this metaphorical coin is the form of a word: the sounds (or letters) that combine to make the spoken or written word. The other side of the coin is the meaning of the word: the image or concept we have in our mind when we use the word. So a word is something that links a given form with a given meaning.

Words are Free

Linguists have also noticed that words behave in a way that other elements of mental grammar don’t because words are free. What does it mean for a word to be free? One observation that leads us to say that words are free is that they can appear in isolation, on their own. In ordinary conversation, we don’t often utter just a single word, but there are plenty of contexts in which a single word is indeed an entire utterance. Here are some examples:

Each of those single words is perfectly grammatical standing in isolation as the answer to a question.

Words are Moveable

Another reason we say that words are free is that they’re moveable: they can occupy a whole variety of different positions in a sentence.  Look at these examples:

The word soup can appear as the last word in a sentence, as the first word, or in the middle of a sentence.  It’s free to be moved around.

Words are Inseparable

The other important observation we can make about words is that they’re inseparable: We can’t break them up by putting other pieces inside them. For example, in the sentence,

The word carrot has a bit of information added to the end of it to show that there’s more than one carrot. But that bit of information can’t go just anywhere:  it can’t interrupt the word carrot:

*Penny cooked some car-s-rot.

This might seem like a trivial observation – of course, you can’t break words up into bits! – but if we look at a word that’s a little more complex than carrots we see that it’s an important insight.  What about:

That’s fine, but it’s totally impossible to say:

*Penny bought two vegetables peeler.

even though she probably uses the peeler to peel multiple vegetables.  It’s not that a plural -s can’t go on the end of the word vegetable; it’s that the word vegetable peeler is a single word (even though we spell it with a space between the two parts of it).  And because it’s a single word, it’s inseparable, so we can’t add anything else into the middle of it.

Morphemes

So we’ve seen that a word is a free form that has a meaning.  But you’ve probably already noticed that there are other forms that have meaning and some of them seem to be smaller than whole words. A morpheme is the smallest form that has meaning. Some morphemes are free: they can appear in isolation. (This means that some words are also morphemes.)  But some morphemes can only ever appear when they’re attached to something else; these are called bound morphemes.

Bound Morphemes

Let’s go back to that simple sentence,

It’s quite straightforward to say that this sentence has four words in it. We can make the observations we just discussed above to check for isolation, moveability, and inseparability to provide evidence that each of Penny, cooked, some, and carrots is a word. But there are more than four units of meaning in the sentence.

The word cooked is made up of the word cook plus another small form that tells us that the cooking happened in the past.  And the word carrots is made up of carrot plus a bit that tells us that there’s more than one carrot.

That little bit that’s spelled –ed (and pronounced a few different ways depending on the environment) has a consistent meaning in English: past tense.  We can easily think of several other examples where that form has that meaning, like walked, baked, cleaned, kicked, kissed. This –ed unit appears consistently in this form and consistently has this meaning, but it never appears in isolation: it’s always attached at the end of a word. It’s a bound morpheme. For example, if someone tells you, “I need you to walk the dog,” it’s not grammatical to answer “-ed” to indicate that you already walked the dog.

Likewise, the bit that’s spelled –s  or –es (and pronounced a few different ways) has a consistent meaning in many different words, like carrots, bananas, books, skates, cars, dishes, and many others.  Like –ed, it is not free: it can’t appear in isolation.  It’s a bound morpheme too.

Simple vs Complex Morphemes

If a word is made up of just one morpheme, like banana, swim, hungry, then we say that it’s morphologically simple, or monomorphemic.

But many words have more than one morpheme in them: they’re morphologically complex or polymorphemic. In English, polymorphemic words are usually made up of a root plus one or more affixes. The root morpheme is the single morpheme that determines the core meaning of the word. In most cases in English, the root is a morpheme that could be free. The affixes are bound morphemes. English has affixes that attach to the end of a root; these are called suffixes, like in books, teaching, happier, hopeful, singer. And English also has affixes that attach to the beginning of a word, called prefixes, like in unzip, reheat, disagree, impossible.

Infixes

Some languages have bound morphemes that go into the middle of a word; these are called infixes. Here are some examples from Tagalog (a language with about 24 million speakers, most of them in the Philippines).

It might seem like the existence of infixes is a problem for our claim above that words are inseparable. But languages that allow infixation do so in a systematic way — the infix can’t be dropped just anywhere in the word. In Tagalog, the position of the infix depends on the organization of the syllables in the word.

Did you spot the difference between present tense and past tense? The past tense of the word contains the infix, “um,” immediately following the first letter of the word.

Inflectional Morphology

Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that add grammatical information to a word. When a word is inflected, it still retains its core meaning, and its category stays the same. We’ve actually already talked about several different inflectional morphemes:

Noun Number

The number on a noun is inflectional morphology.  For most English nouns the inflectional morpheme for the plural is an –s or –es (e.g., books, cars, dishes) that gets added to the singular form of the noun, but there are also a few words with irregular plural morphemes. Some languages also have a special morpheme for the dual number, to indicate exactly two of something. Here’s an example from Manam, one of the many languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. You can see that there’s a morpheme on the noun woman that indicates dual, for exactly two women, and a different morpheme for plural, that is, more than two women.

Verb Tense

The tense on a verb is also inflectional morphology. For many English verbs, the past tense is spelled with an –ed, (walked, cooked, climbed) but there are also many English verbs where the tense inflection is indicated with a change in the vowel of the verb (sang, wrote, ate).  English does not have a bound morpheme that indicates future tense, but many languages do.

Verb Agreement

Another kind of inflectional morphology is agreement on verbs.  If you’ve learned French or Spanish or Italian, you know that the suffix at the end of a verb changes depending on who the subject of the verb is.  That’s agreement inflection.  Here are some examples from French. You can see that there’s a different morpheme on the end of each verb depending on who’s doing the singing.

Case Inflection

And in some languages, the morphology on a noun changes depending on the noun’s role in a sentence; this is called case inflection.  Take a look at these two sentences in German: The first one, Der Junge sieht Sofia, means that, “The boy sees Sofia”.  Look at the form of the phrase, the boy, “der Junge”. Now, look at this other sentence, Sofia sieht den Jungen, which means that “Sofia sees the boy”. In the first sentence, the boy is doing the seeing, but in the second, the boy is getting seen, and the word for boy, Junge has a different morpheme on it to indicate its different role in the sentence.  That’s an example of case morphology, which is another kind of inflection.

Derivational Morphology

The other big job that morphemes have is a derivation.  The derivation is the process of creating a new word. The new, derived word is related to the original word, but it has some new component of meaning to it, and often it belongs to a new category.

One of the most common ways that English derives new words is by affixing a derivational morpheme to a base.  For example, if we start with a verb that describes an action, like teach, and we add the morpheme –er, we derive a morphologically complex noun, teacher, that refers to the person who does the action of teaching. That same -er morpheme does the same job in singer, dancer, baker, and writer.

If we start with an adjective like happy and add the suffix –ness, we derive the noun that refers to the state of being that adjective, happiness.

Adding the suffix –ful to a noun derives an adjective, like hopeful.

Adding the suffix–ize to an adjective like final derives a verb like finalize.

Notice that each of the morphologically complex derived words is related in meaning to the base, but it has a new meaning of its own. English also derives new words by prefixing, and while adding a derivational prefix does lead to a new word with a new meaning, it often doesn’t lead to a category change.

Each instance of derivation creates a new word, and that new word could then serve as the base for another instance of derivation, so it’s possible to have words that are quite complex morphologically.

For example, say you have a machine that you use to compute things; you might call it a computer (compute + -er).Then if people start using that machine to perform a task, you could say that they’re going to computerize (computer + -ize) that task.  Perhaps the computerization (computerize + -ation) of that task makes it much more efficient. You can see how many words have many steps in their derivations.

An interesting thing to note is that once a base has been inflected, then it can no longer go through any derivations.  We can inflect the word computer so that we can talk about plural computers, but then we can’t do derivation on the plural form (*computers-ize).  Likewise, we can add tense inflection to the verb computerize and talk about how yesterday we computerized something, but then we can’t take that inflected form and use it as the base for a new derivation (*computerized-ation).  Inflection always occurs as the last step in word formation.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OiBeAe4t7sk%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26rel%3D0