2. Morphology.

Morphology has always been one of the main branches of Linguistics. That the basic linguistic unit is the word. It is taken for granted that it is within the word the different lexical and grammatical phenomena are realized. If we describe the word as an independent unit of language in which a particular meaning is associated with a particular sound complex and which is capable of a particular grammatical employment and able to form a sentence by itself, we have the possibility to distinguish it from the other fundamental unit namely the morpheme.

The term morpheme.

A morpheme is an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. Morphology which literally means the study of forms was originally used in Biology but since the middle of the 19 c.has also been used to analyze, to describe the type of investigation that analyses the basic elements used in a language. We can recognize that English word forms such as talks, talker, talking must consist of one element as –s, -er, -ed, -ing. All these elements are described as morphemes.

Morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. The morpheme is the minimal meaningful unit of the form. Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural.(REOPENED: open- a min.unit of meaning; re – a min.unit of meaning ‘again’; ed- a min.unit of meaning indicating past tense).

Free and bound morphemes.

Morpheme is a minimal meaningful unit of form. We have 2 types of morphemes – free and bound. Free are those which can stand alone as words of the language. They can occur in isolation and cannot be divided into smaller meaning unit. Most of all free morphemes are basic nouns adjectives verbs and so on. Most roots in English are free morphemes. F. E.: dog, syntax. But almost each of them can be combined with bound morphemes. Bound morphemes can’t stand alone. They must be attached to other morphemes. They are meaning-bearing units of language such as affixes, prefixes and suffixes. Their attachment modifies the free morphemes in such things as number or syntactic category. F.E: adding the bound morpheme “–s” to the free morpheme CAT changes the noun’s number; the addition of the “-d” to verb SMILE changes the tense. Similarly the addition of “-er” to verb RUN changes the verb into a noun. Also examples: suffixes “-ness” “-ship” build new words as darkness, friendship. The prefixes “im-, dis-, de-“in the words impolite, disregard. But there also number of words in English in which the element treated as the stem, not as a free morpheme. FE: receive, repeat. Such elements as –ceive, -peat can’t stay as isolated words. They can’t be free. This type is described as bound stem and keep it distinct from free stems.

Lexical & Functional morphemes.

Free morphemes fall into 2 categories. First category is the set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that carry the content of the messages we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical (f.e. girl, man, house). We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily so they are treated as an open class of words. Second type of free morphemes is called functional morphemes (f.e. and, but, when, because, near, about, that, them). We never add new functional morphemes to the language, so they are treated as a close class of words.

Derivational & Inflectional morphemes.

The set of affixes that make up the category of bound morphemes can also be divided into 2 types. First – derivational morphemes. We use these bound morphemes to make new words of a different grammatical category from the stem. The addition of derivational morpheme –ness changes the adj. good to the noun goodness. A list of derivational morphemes will include suffixes such as the –ish in foolish, -ly in quickly.

The second set of bound morphemes contains inflectional morphemes. These are not used to produce new words in the language but rather to indicate aspects of grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is singular or plural, if it is past tense or not & if it is a comparative form or possessive case. English has only 8 inflectional morphemes.

Morphological description

The difference between derivational & inflexional morphemes is worth emphasizing. Inflexional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. However, derivational morpheme can change grammatical category of a word. The word “to teach” comes a noun with help of derivational morpheme “er”. The suffix “er” in modern English can be an inflexional morpheme as a part of an adjective and also a distinct derivational morpheme as part of a noun.

There is a derivational suffix & inflexional suffix attached to the same word, they always appear in that order. First, the derivational “er” is attached to “teach”, then the inflexional “s” is added to produce “teachers”.

Useful way to remember all these types is the following table

Lexical (child, teach)

Free

Morphemes Functional (conjunctions, prepositions)

Bound Derivational (re-, -ness)

Inflexional (‘s, -ed)