4.2 Morphological Structure of Words

Morphology is the study of structure, or form, or description of word-formation (as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language and the system of word-forming elements and processes in a language (Webster, p.1170). William O’Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller add that morphology is “the system of categories and rules involved in word-formation and interpretation” (2001, p.720). In morphology, the proper topic of study is the play of prefixes and suffixes or the internal changes within the word, which modify the word’s basic meaning. Modern descriptive linguists prefer such traditional terms as inflectional endings, root, stem, and morpheme. Where the traditional grammar would describe cats as consisting of the root cat and –s as an inflectional plural ending, the modern structural linguist would describe both cat and the ending–s as two different morphemes or units of meaning --one carrying the basic meaning of the word; the other, the accessory notion of plurality. However, a distinction would be set up between the two by labeling cat as a free morpheme, which could be used in isolation, and ending–s as a bound morpheme, which has no separate existence. Bloomfield labeled the meaning of the morpheme a “sememe” (as cited in Chisholm, 1981, p. 16); however, linguists did not study the meaning of a morpheme, so this term was dropped out of usage in linguistics. Bloomfield recognized that the complex meaning in a language is not simply the result of combining morphemes. He called the basic feature of arrangement of morphemes a taxeme (1935, p.116). He believes taxemes are meaningless, if taken in the abstract. Combinations of single taxemes occur as conventional grammatical arrangements, tactic forms (p.116). In a linguistic system, a taxeme is parallel to the phoneme in that neither has a meaning, but each is a minimal form-- a phoneme at the phonological level and a taxeme at the grammatical level.

4.2.1 Free and Bound Morphemes

A morpheme, which can occur alone as an individual word, is called a free morpheme, whereas a morpheme which can occur only with another morpheme is called a bound morpheme. The morpheme think is a free morpheme; however, morphemes un- and –able in the word unthinkable are bound morphemes. As we mentioned before, any concrete realization of a morpheme is called a morph. A morph should not be confused with a syllable. The difference between them is that “while morphs are manifestations of morphemes and represent specific meaning, syllables are parts of words which are isolated only on the basis of pronunciation” (Jackson & Zé Amvela, 2007, p.4). Other examples of a morpheme’s change when it is combined with another element can be traced in the following examples: the final segment of permit is [t] when it stands alone; however, when the word combines with the morpheme –ion, [t] changes to [∫] in the word permission. Similar alternations are found in the words allude/allusion, alternate/alternation, amalgamate/amalgamation, annotate/annotation, and assuage/assuasive.

Victoria A. Fromkin et al. (2000) name morphemes that represent categories of words as lexical morphemes. They refer to items (book, pen, table, etc.), actions (go, run, swim, etc.), attributes (red, fair, long, short, etc.), and concepts (theory, notion, etc.) that can be described with words or illustrated with pictures. Such morphemes as –ly, un-, -ed, -s, a, the, an, about, to, this, that, etc. are considered grammatical morphemes; the speaker uses them to signal the relationship between a word and the context in which they are used. Prepositions and determiners belong to grammatical morphemes because they express only a limited range of concepts. It should be noted that not all lexical morphemes are free morphemes, and not all grammatical morphemes are bound morphemes. Such grammatical morphemes as prepositions (about, for, to, etc.) and determiners (this, that, a, an, the, etc.) are free morphemes because they can stand alone.