语言学大作业

The Understanding of Morphology

After learning Chapter3 Morphology, I get more than I had imagined, knowing something new. For example, I can define the free and bound morphemes and distinguish the differences of foresaid terms and dissect the words into morphemes and root. There are some understandings of it below.

A sentence is not the smallest grammatical unit, as it consists of other smaller units called words. In many languages, what appear to be single forms actually turn out to contain a large number of ―word-like‖ elements. For example, in English, the word unfriendly is formed from friend, the adjective forming suffix –ly and the negative prefix un-. These three ―word-like‖ el ements are the most basic elements of meaning.

Firstly, morphology, in my opinion, refers to the study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed. We can divided all words into two main groups, one group is open class words that also are called content words, which includes nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs; the other group is close class words that are also called grammatical/functional words, which includes conjunction, prepositions, articles, pronouns and determiners.

Secondly, morphemes—the minimal unit of meaning, is the smallest unit that carries grammatical and /or semantic meaning. For example, the English word tourists contain three morphemes: tour------the root, -ist ------person who does something, -s ------indicating plurality. Morphemes also can be divided into two main groups that are free morphemes and bound morphemes; what’s more, each of them also contains two groups. Next, I will explain them one by one. Free morpheme can stand alone as words. They can be used on their own, such car, tree, sing, dance, etc. A word must contain an element that can stand by itself. Such an element is called a root. A word may contain more than one root, in which case it is a compound word, e.g. bookshop and blackbird. In this part, we should understand the different between root and stem.

A root is that part of the word left when all the affixes (inflectional & derivational) are removed, e.g. ―desire‖ in ―desirable‖, ―care‖ in ―carefully‖, while a stem is part of a word-form which remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed, e.g. ―undesirable‖ in ―undesirables‖. A stem of a word may be contains several kinds below. (i)A simple stem consisting of only one morpheme, in which case the root and the stem are the same, e.g. work is both the stem and the root. (ii) A root plus a derivational affix, e.g. worker, work is the root, worker is the stem. (iii) Two or more roots, e.g. workshop, both work and shop are roots, workshop is the stem.

Thirdly, I will explain the affix. There are three kinds of it: prefixes, suffixes and infixes. Prefixes are the morphemes that can be joined to the beginning of the root or stem. Prefix can change the meaning or function of the word, e.g. un-, dis-, anti-, ir-, etc. Suffixes are the morphemes that can be joined to the end of the root or stem. Suffix can also change the meaning or function of the word, e.g. -ful, -er, -ish, -ness, -able, -tive, -tion, etc. Infixes are the morphemes that are inserted into other morpheme. Compared to prefixes and suffixes, infixes are relatively rare in the languages of the world.

Fourthly, I will introduce free morphemes and bond morphemes in details. Free