Morphology

Chapter 3 Morphology
• Sentences are made up with different classes of words, which are stored in a speaker’s mental dictionary or lexicon. • How are words formed?
Derivational morpheme & inflectional morpheme
• Derivational morphemes---- the morphemes which are added to another morpheme to derive a new word and may or may not change the category, or grammatical class of words, e.g. modern---modernize, length---lengthen, fool--foolish, etc. • It is always possible to assign a lexical meaning to all the morphemes. (?)
Some other terms
• Root
• Stem • Base
Root
• 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”, “nation” in “internationalism”, “believe” in “unbeliev(e)able”…
Morpheme--the minimal unit of meaning
--- morph: the phonetic realization of a morpheme. A morpheme if manifested as one or more morphs in different environment.
Allomorph
• 词素可以由不同形式表现出来，这些形式叫词 素变体。例如，在以下词汇impossible, immoral, irregular, irresistible之中英语前缀in- 有四个词素 变体（allomorph）。另外英语可数名词的复数 形式也属于具有词素变体的词素，那就是-s和es。一些可数名词表示复数性不改变其形式。
Free morpheme & bound morpheme
• Free morpheme----is one that may constitute a word (free form) by itself, such as bed, tree, sing, dance, etc. • Bound morpheme----is one that may appear with at least one other morpheme. They can not stand by themselves, such as “-s” in “dogs”, “al” in “national”, “dis-” in “disclose”, “ed” in “recorded”, etc.
Chapter 3 Morphology
• Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.
Open class word and closed class word
Morpheme--the minimal unit of meaning
---Words are composed of morphemes. Words may consist of one morpheme or more morphemes, e.g. • 1-morpheme boy, desire • 2-morpheme boy+ish, desir(e)+ble • 3-morpheme boy+ish+ness, desir(e)+bl(e)+ity • 4-morpheme gentle+man+li+ness, un+desir(e)+abl(e)+ity • 5-morpheme un+gentle+man+li+ness
• Open class words----content words of a language to which we can regularly add new words, such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, e.g. beatnik(a member of the Beat Generation), hacker, email, internet, “做秀，时 装秀…” in Chinese. • Closed class words----grammatical or functional words, such as conjunction, articles, preposition and pronouns.
Morphological rules
• The rules that govern the formation of words, e.g. the “un- + ----” rule. unfair unthinkable unacceptable… Productive vs less productive • Compounding is another way to form new words, e.g. landlady rainbow undertake…
Morphological rules
• Productive: Some morphological rules which can be used quite freely to form new words. • Less productive: • Un-Rule is as productive for adjectives containing just one morpheme as those that are derived from verbs. (F) • A productive morphological rule can become less productive.(T)
The difference between root, stem & base
• A base can be added by both inflectional & derivational affixes while a stem can be added only by inflectional affixes; • A base is derivationally analyzable (e.g. undesire in undesirable) while a root cannot be further analyzed, e.g. desire in undesirable; • Root, stem and base can be the same form, e.g. desire in desired; • Undesirable in undesirables is either a stem or a base; • Desirable in undesirable is only a base.
Derivational morpheme & inflectional morpheme
• Inflectional morphemes---- the bound morphemes which are for the most part purely grammatical markers, signifying such concepts as tense, number, case and so on; they never change their syntactic category, never add any lexical meaning, e.g. a) number: tables apples cars b) person, finiteness and aspect: talk/talks/talking/talked c) case: John/John’s
Stem
• A stem is part of a word-form which remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed, e.g. “undesiralbe” in undesirables
Base
• A base is any form to which affixes of any kind can be added. This means any stem and root can be termed as a base.
Morpheme--the minimal unit of meaning
--- Word: the smallest form in language. A free form is simply an element that does not have to occur in a fixed position with respect to its neighboring elements; in many cases, it can even appear in isolation.