MORPHOLOGY....

By prof. Abdelhamid Fouda 

Morphology is the study of word formation and structure .it studies how words are put together from their smaller parts and the rules governing this process. Morphologists study minimal units of meaning, called morphemes and investigate the possible combinations of these units in a language to form words. Morphologist traditionally located between phonology and syntax.

UNITS OF DESCRIPTION:-

MORPH:-

Any item of lang which cannot further broken down any further without any lose of meaning .a morph usually realizes a morpheme. For example, in the case of regular past tense paradigm such as ‘attacked’ we can identify two morphs,’attack+ed’ which in turn realize two morphemes,(attack)+(past). In the same way, at the morphemic level, the irregular forms ate, and mice, have an identical abstract structure to their regular counterparts, i.e, (eat) + (past), and (mouse) + (plural).

MORPHEMES:-

The definition of a morpheme is “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function’. for example,”reopened”,consists of three morphemes .one minimal unit of meaning is open, another is re (meaning again),and a minimal unit of grammatical function is  ed.(indicating past tense).words which consists of just one morpheme are termed monomorphemic and those which are made up of more are termed polymorphemic.

ALLOMORPH:-

When a morpheme is realized by a series of different morphs in this way the alternative realization are called allomorphs. These particular allomorphs are determined by the phonological characteristics of the final segment of the stem.

Allomorphs of English (plural, past)

1) Judges: /iz/. (Plural).occurs after stem ending in a voiced or voiceless sibilant.

2) ‘Saved’: /d/. (Past. Occurs after stem ending in a voiced segment other than an alveolar plosive).

KINDS OF MORPHEMES:-

FREE:-

There are free morphemes, that is,morphems which can stand by themselves as single words.e.g.’open’,’tour’.

BOUND MORPHEMES:-

There are also bound morphemes, that is those which cannot normally stand alone,-ist, ed, y (tourist, opened, lucky) are bound morphemes.

LEXICAL MORPHEMES:-

A set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which we think of as the words which carry the content of message we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes and some examples are; boy-man-house-tiger-sad-yellow-sincere-open-look-follow-break.

FUNCTIONAL MORPHEMES:-

The other set of free morphemes are called functional morphemes. This set consists largely of the functional words in the lang. such as conjuctions, prepositions, articles, a and pronouns.

GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES:-

The sorts of morphemes which signal the inflectional processes, we describe are grammatical morphemes. Their purpose is to indicate relationships demanded by the grammar. As such they don’t create new lexemes or new dictionary item, s.e.g.a, the, at, on, an.

BRANCHES OF MORPHOLOGY:-

There are two kinds of morphology. Inflectional and derivational.

INFLECTIONAL:-

Is concerned with the grammatical processes by which we form such things as past tense, plural,and present participle. The new inflectional which do remain as signaled by a comparatively smaller number of regular morphemes;

VERB INFLECTIONALS;

1) Past tense; ed (attack+ed)

2) Past participle;ed (attack+ed).

3) Present participle; ing (attack+ing).

4) 3rd person singular present tense;s (attack+s).

NOUN INFLECTINS:-

5) Plural: s (dog+s)

6) Possessive; s,s’ (dog+;s,dog+s’).

ADJECTIVE /ADVERV INFLECTIONS:-

7) Comparative; er (larger+er).

8) Superlative; est (large-est).

In addition to these there are pronouns inflections indicating number and case.

DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES:-

Some morphemes derive (create) new words by either changing the meaning (happy vs. unhappy, e,g ripe, an adjective, vs. ripen, a verb)or both .these are called derivational morphemes.

In English, the derivational morphemes are either prefixes or suffixes, but the inflectional morphemes are all suffices. There are only eight of them in English. Below are listed four characteristics which separate inflectional and derivational affixes.

1-Inflectional morphemes don’t change meaning or part of speech, e.g. big and bigger are both adjectives. But derivational morphemes change the meaning or part f speech; e.g ment forms nouns, such as judgement, from verb, such as judge

2-Inflectional morphemes typically indicate syntactic or semantic relations between different words in a sentence, e.g.the present tense morpheme’s ‘in ‘waits’ shows agreement with the subject if verb (both are third person singular).but derivational morphemes typically indicate semantic relations within the word, e.g the morpheme ful in painful has no particular connection with any other morphemes beyond the word painful.

3-The inflectional morphemes typically occur with all the members e.g. the plural morphemes-s occurs with most nouns. But derivational morphemes typically occurs with only some members of a class of morphems, e.g.the suffix-hood ‘occurs with just a few nouns such as brother, neighbor, and knight, but not with most others, e, g, friend, daughter, candle etc.

4-inlfectinal morphemes typically occur at the margins of words, e.g. the plural morphemes-s always comes last in a word, as in babysitters or rationalization. But derivational morphemes typically occur before inflectional suffixes g, in chillier, native speaker of English doesn’t use.

BLENDING:-

Blending is a combination of clipping and compounding, which make s new words by putting together fragments of existing words in new combinations.e.g.1-smoke+fog-smog

2-breakfast+lunch-brunch

IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHEMS:-

Most of the past tenses which lack the –ed suffix are clearly differentiated from the base form by a difference of syllable nucleus, e.g

Discovered=discover+suffixed-ed

Found=find+difference of syllable nucleus.

When it is so stated, it becomes evident that ht difference of syllable nucleus functions in some ways like the suffix. We may consider such a difference n morphemes as a special type of morphemic element called replosive.found=find+ou.