A morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has grammatical function or meaning (NB not the smallest unit of meaning); we will designate them in braces—{ }. For example, sawed, sawn, sawing, and saws can all be analyzed into the morphemes {saw} + {‑ed}, {‑n}, {‑ing}, and {‑s}, respectively. None of these last four can be further divided into meaningful units and each occurs in many other words, such as looked, mown, coughing, bakes. {Saw} can occur on its own as a word; it does not have to be attached to another morpheme. It is a free morpheme. However, none of the other morphemes listed just above is free. Each must be affixed (attached) to some other unit; each can only occur as a part of a word. Morphemes that must be attached as word parts are said to be bound

Affixes are classified according to whether they are attached before or after the form to which they are added. Prefixes are attached before and suffixes after. The bound morphemes listed earlier are all suffixes; the {re‑} of resaw is a prefix. Further examples of prefixes and suffixes are presented in Root, derivational, and inflectional morphemes Besides being bound or free, morphemes can also be classified as root, derivational, or inflectional. A root morpheme is the basic form to which other morphemes are attached. It provides the basic meaning of the word.The morpheme {saw} is the root of sawers. Derivational morphemes are added to forms to create separate words: {‑er} is a derivational suffix whose addition turns a verb into a noun, usually meaning the person or thing that performs the action denoted by the verb. For example, {paint}+{-er} creates painter, one of whose meanings is “someone who paints.”

Inflectional morphemes do not create separate words. They merely modify the word in which they occur in order to indicate grammatical properties such as plurality, as the {-s} of magazines does, or past tense, as the {ed} of babecued does. English has eight inflectional morphemes, which we will describe below.

We can regard the root of a word as the morpheme left over when all the derivational and inflectional morphemes have been removed. For example,

in immovability, {im-}, {-abil}, and {-ity} are all derivational morphemes, and when we remove them we are left with {move}, which cannot be further divided into meaningful pieces, and so must be the word’s root.

We must distinguish between a word’s root and the forms to which affixes are attached. In moveable, {-able} is attached to {move}, which we’ve determined is the word’s root. However, {im-} is attached to moveable, not to {move} (there is no word immove), but moveable is not a root. Expressions to which affixes are attached are called bases. While roots may be bases, bases are not always roots.

morphemes, allomorphs, and morphs

The English plural morpheme {-s} can be expressed by three different but clearly related phonemic forms /z/ or /z/, /z/, and /s/. These three have in common not only their meaning, but also the fact that each contains an alveolar fricative phoneme, either /s/ or /z/. The three forms are in complementary distribution, because each occurs where the others cannot, and it is possible to predict just where each occurs: /z/ after sibilants (/s, z, , , t, d/), /z/ after voiced segments, and /s/ everywhere else. Given the semantic and phonological similarities between the three forms and the fact that they are in complementary distribution, it is reasonable to view them as contextual pronunciation variants of a single entity. In parallel with phonology, we will refer to the entity of which the three are variant representations as amorpheme, and the variant forms of a given morpheme as its allomorphs.

WORDS

Words are notoriously difficult entities to define, both in universal and in language specific terms. Like most linguistic entities, they look in two directions— upward toward larger units of which they are parts (toward phrases), and downward toward their constituent morphemes. eral other criteria that have been proposed for identifying them. One possible criterion is spelling: in written English text, we tend to regard as a word any expression that has no spaces within it and is separated by spaces from other expressions. While this is a very useful criterion, it does sometimes lead to inconsistent and unsatisfactory results. For instance, cannot is spelled as one word but might not as two; compounds (words composed of two or more words; see below) are inconsistently divided (cf. influx, in-laws, goose flesh, low income vs. low-income).

Words tend to resist interruption; we cannot freely insert pieces into words as we do into sentences. For example, we cannot separate the root of a word from its inflectional ending by inserting another word, as in *sockblue‑s for blue socks. Sentences, in contrast, can be interrupted. We can insert adverbials between subjects and predicates: John quickly erased his fingerprints.

By definition, we can also insert the traditional interjections: We will, I believe, have rain later today.

In English, though by no means in all languages, the order of elements in words is quite fixed. English inflections, for example, are suffixes and are added after any derivational morphemes in a word. At higher levels in the language, different orders of elements can differ in meaning: compare John kissed Mary with Mary kissed John. But we do not contrast words with prefixed inflections with words with suffixed inflections. English does not contrast, for example, piece + s with s + piece.

In English, too, it is specific individual words that select for certain inflections. Thus the word child is pluralized by adding {‑ren}, ox by adding {‑en}. So if a form takes the {-en} plural, it must be a word.

So words are units composed of one or more morphemes; they are also the units of which phrases are composed.

English inflectional morphology

Inflectional morphemes, as we noted earlier, alter the form of a word in order to indicate certain grammatical properties. English has only eight inflectional morphemes, listed in Table 1, along with the properties they indicate.

Except for {-en}, the forms we list in Table 1 are the regular English inflections. They are regular because they are the inflections added to the vast majority of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs to indicate grammatical properties such as tense, number, and degree.

They are also the inflections we typically add to new words coming into the language, for example, we add {-s} to the noun throughput to make it plural. When we borrow words from other languages, in most cases we add the regular English inflections to them rather than borrow the inflections

However, because of its long and complex history, English (like all languages) has many irregular forms, which may be irregular in a variety of ways. First, irregular words may use different inflections than regular ones: for example, the modern past participle inflection of a regular verb is {-ed}, but the past participle of freeze is frozen and the past participle of break is broken. Second, irregular forms may involve internal vowel changes, as in man/men, woman/women, grow/grew, ring/rang/rung. Third, some forms derive from historically unrelated forms: went, the past tense of go, historically was the past tense of a different verb, wend. This sort of realignment is known as suppletion. Other examples of suppletion include good, better, and best, and bad, worse, and worst. (As an exercise, you might look up be, am, and is in a dictionary that provides etymological information, such as the American Heritage.) Fourth, some words show no inflectional change: sheep is both singular and plural; hit is both present and past tense, as well as past participle. Fifth, many borrowed words, especially nouns, have irregular inflected forms: alumnae and cherubim are the plurals of alumna .

Irregular forms demonstrate the abstract status of morphemes. Thus the word men realizes (represents, makes real) the two morphemes {man} and {plural}; women realizes {woman} and {plural}; went realizes {go} and {past tense}. Most grammar and writing textbooks contain long lists of these exceptions.

As a final issue here we must note that different groups of English speakers use different inflected forms of words, especially of verbs. When this is the case, the standard variety of the language typically selects one and rejects the others as non-standard, or, illogically, as “not English,” or worse. For example, many English speakers use a single form of be in the past tense (was) regardless of what the subject of its clause is.

Derivation is the process of creating separate but morphologically related words. Typically, but not always, it involves one or more changes in form. It can involve prefixing, as in resaw, and suffixing, as in sawing, sawer, sawable.

Another type of derivation, while not visible, is at least audible. It involves a change in the position of the primary stress in a word. Compare:

(3) permit (noun) permit (verb)

contact (noun) contact (verb)

perfect (adj.) perfect (verb)

convert (noun) convert (verb)

In some derivationally related word pairs, only a feature of the final consonant changes, usually its voicing:

Compounding

The italicized words in (11) are created by combining saw with some other word, rather than with a bound morpheme. (11)

a. A sawmill is a noisy place.

b. Every workshop should have a chain saw, a table saw, a jig-saw, a

hack saw, and a bucksaw.

c. Sawdust is always a problem in a woodworker’s workshop.

d. Sawing horses are useful and easily made.

Such words are called compounds. They contain two or more words (or more accurately, two or more roots, all, one, or none of which may be bound; cf. blueberry with two free morphemes, and astronaut with two bound morphemes). Generally, one of the words is the head of the compound and the other(s) its modifier(s). In bucksaw, saw is the head, which is modified by buck. The order is significant: compare pack rat with rat pack. Generally, the modifier comes before the head.

In ordinary English spelling, compounds are sometimes spelled as single words, as in sawmill, sawdust; sometimes the parts are connected by a hyphen, as in jig‑saw; and sometimes they are spelled as two words, as in chain saw, oil well. (Dictionaries may differ in their spellings.) Nonetheless, we are justified in classifying all such cases as compound words regardless of their conventional spelling for a variety of reasons.

First, the stress pattern of the compound word is usually different from the stress pattern in the phrase composed of the same words in the same order. Compare: (12) compound phrase

White House white house

funny farm funny farm

blackbird black bird

flatcar flat car

In the compounds the main stress is on the first word; in the phrases the main stress is on the last word. While this pattern does not apply to all compounds, it is so generally true that it provides a very useful test.

Second, the meaning of the compound may differ to a greater or lesser degree from that of the corresponding phrase. A blackbird is a species of bird, regardless of its color; a black bird is a bird which is black, regardless of its species. A trotting-horse is a kind of horse, regardless of its current activity; a trotting horse must be a horse that is currently trotting. So, because the meanings of compounds are not always predictable from the meanings of their constituents, dictionaries often provide individual entries for them.

They do not do this for phrases, unless the meaning of the phrase is idiomatic and therefore not derivable from the meanings of its parts and how they are put together, e.g., raining cats and dogs. Generally the meaning of a phrase is predictable from the meanings of its constituents, and so phrases need not be listed individually. (Indeed, because the number of possible phrases in a language is infinite, it is in principle impossible to list them all.)

Third, in many compounds, the order of the constituent words is different from that in the corresponding phrase:

compound phrase

sawmill mill for sawing

sawing horse horse for sawing

sawdust dust from sawing

Fourth, compound nouns allow no modification to the first element.

This contrasts with noun phrases, which do allow modification to the modifier: compare *a really-blackbird and a really black bird. There are a number of ways of approaching the study and classification of compound words, the most accessible of which is to classify them according to the part of speech of the compound and then sub-classify them according to the parts of speech of its constituents

1. Compound nouns

a. Noun + noun: bath towel; boy-friend; death blow

b. Verb + noun: pickpocket; breakfast

c. Noun +verb: nosebleed; sunshine

d. Verb +verb: make-believe

e. Adjective + noun: deep structure; fast-food

f. Particle + noun: in-crowd; down-town

g. Adverb + noun: now generation

h. Verb + particle: cop-out; drop-out

i. Phrase compounds: son-in-law

2. Compound verbs

a. Noun + verb: sky-dive

b. Adjective + verb: fine-tune

c. Particle + verb: overbook

d. Adjective + noun: brown-bag

3. Compound adjectives

a. Noun + adjective: card-carrying; childproof

b. Verb + adjective: fail safe

c. Adjective + adjective: open-ended

d. Adverb + adjective: cross-modal

e. Particle + adjective: over-qualified

f. Noun + noun: coffee-table

g. Verb + noun: roll-neck

h. Adjective + noun: red-brick; blue-collar

i. Particle + noun: in-depth

j. Verb + verb: go-go; make-believe

k. Adjective/Adverb + verb: high-rise;

l. Verb + particle: see-through; tow-away

4. Compound adverbs

uptightly

cross-modally

5. Neo-classical compounds

astro-naut

hydro-electric

mechano-phobe

Other sources of words

Besides derivation and compounding, languages make use of coining, abbreviating,

blending, and borrowing to create new words.

Coining is the creation of new words without reference to the existing morphological resources of the language, that is, solely out of the sounds of the language. Coining is very rare, but googol [note the spelling] is an attested example, meaning 10100. This word was invented in 1940 by the nine-year-old nephew of a mathematician (see Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary Vol. III Supplement to the OED Vols. I-IV: 1987 p. 317).

Abbreviation involves the shortening of existing words to create other words, usually informal versions of the originals. There are several ways to abbreviate. We may simply lop off one or more syllables, as in prof for professor, doc for doctor. Usually the syllable left over provides enough information

Morpholog y and Word Formation to allow us to identify the word it’s an abbreviation of,though occasionally this is not the case: United Airlines’s low cost carrier is called Ted. (Go figure!) Alternatively, we may use the first letter of each word in a phrase to create a new expression, an acronym, as in UN, US, or SUV. In these instances the acronym is pronounced as a sequence of  letter names. In other instances, such as UNICEF from United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the acronym can be pronounced as an ordinary English word. Advertisers make prolific use of acronyms and often try to make them pronounceable as ordinary words.

Blending involves taking two or more words, removing parts of each, and joining the residues together to create a new word whose form and meaning are taken from the source words. Smog derives from smoke and fog and means a combination of these two substances (and probably lots of

others); motel derives from motor and hotel and refers to hotels that are convenient in various ways to motorists; Prevacid derives from prevent acid; eracism derives from erase and racism and means erase racism or, if read against the grain, electronic racism (cf. email, ecommerce, E-trade); webinar derives from (worldwide) web and seminar. In November 2007, an interviewee on an NPR news item created the blend snolo to refer to playing bike polo in the snow.

Borrowing involves copying a word that originally belonged in one language into another language. For instance, many terms from Mexican cuisine, like taco and burrito, have become current in American English and are spreading to other English dialects. Borrowing requires that the borrowing language and the source language come in contact with each other. Speakers of the borrowing language must learn at least some minimum of the source language for the borrowing to take place. Over its 1500 year history English has borrowed from hundreds of languages, though the main ones are Latin (homicide), Greek (chorus), French (mutton), Italian (aria), Spanish (ranch), German (semester), and the Scandinavian languages (law). From

Native American languages, American English has borrowed place names (Chicago), river names (Mississippi), animal names (opossum), and plant names (hickory).

The borrowed word never remains a perfect copy of its original. It is made to fit the phonological, morphological, and syntactic patterns of its new language. For example, the Spanish pronunciation of burritos is very different from the English pronunciation. At the very least, the two languages use different /r/s and /t/s, and the plural marker {-s} is voiced in English but voiceless in Spanish. See our chapter on the History of the English Language in Book II formore on borrowing.

registers and words

Although most of the words we use every day can be used in almost any context, many words of the language are restricted to uses in certain fields, disciplines, professions, or activities, i.e., registers. For example, the word phoneme is restricted to the linguistic domain. Interestingly, some words may be used in several domains with a different meaning in each, though these meanings may be a specific version of a more general meaning. For example, the word morphology is used in linguistics to refer to the study of the internal structure of words and their derivational relationships; in botany to refer to the forms of plants; in geology to refer to rock formations. The general, abstract meaning underlying these specific meanings is the study

of form.

Besides words that may be used in almost any context and those that are technical or discipline s pecific, there are words that play important roles in academic discourses generally, for example, accuracy; basis; concept and its related forms, conception, conceptual, conceptualize; decrease; effect; factor; indicate and its related forms, indication, indicative; and result. As such words are used across disciplines, generally without local idiosyncrasies of meaning, they are important words for English learners, both native and non-native speakers. For a useful overview of the attempts to create lists of such academic (or subtechnical) words and a new list of them, see Coxhead (2000) and the references therein (another academic word).

The internal structure of complex words Complex words (those composed of more than one morpheme) are not merely unstructured sequences of morphemes. For example, the plural {‑s} suffix on dropouts must be added to the entire compound dropout, not to out to which drop is then added. The reason for this is that the plural suffix may be attached to nouns, but not to verbs or particles. Drop and out constitute a noun only after they have been brought together in the compound.

We can use brackets with subscripts to represent these relations: [N[N[Vdrop][Prtout]]s]. Alternatively, and equivalently, we can use tree diagrams to indicate the parts (constituents) of complex words and their structural relations:

Sample of question

1.      What is morpheme

2.      What is word

3.      What is word formation

4.      Types of word formation and defined each one 

5.      Explain more about compounding