MORPHOLOGY

Morpheme
Kinds of
Morpheme

Aya's prop/Int to Ling (3)

Morphology

A branch of linguistics that deals

with words and word formation

Aya's prop/Int to Lin

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit/constituent in

a language
It cannot be divided further or analyze into
smaller meaningful unit.
It is not necessarily equivalent to a word
Represented within curly braces { } using
capital letters
It is not identical with a syllable
It may consist of only a single phoneme
A Word can be in form of
monomorphemic and polimorphemic
Aya's prop/Int to Lin

Kinds of Morpheme

Free Morpheme :
Morphemes which can occur freely on their own
Bound Morpheme :
Morpheme which can only occur as affixes. It cannot stand by
itself. So, its attached to the free morpheme
e.g. unmanly un+man+ly
b
f
b
meaningless mean+ing+less
f
b
b
Zero Morpheme :
Morpheme which has no phonetic or ouvert realization in the
stream of speech
e.g. sheep I have a sheep
I have two sheep
sheep+

Aya's prop/Int to Lin

Affixes (1)
There are two types of affixes (based on the kinds of words created)
1. Derivational Affixes
It has two functions
To convert one part of speech to another
e.g. Beauty (n) + ful beautiful (adj)
En + rich (adj) enrich (verb)
To change the meaning of the root (class maintaining)
e.g. friend (n) + ship friendship (n)
ex + terminate (v) exterminate (v)
2. inflectional Affixes
The function is to indicate grammatical meaning such as tense or number.
(never change the part of speech)
e.g. Book (n) + -s books
John (n) + s Johns
Foot + vowel change feet
Sing (V) + -s sings
Thin (adj) + -er thinner

Aya's prop/Int to Lin

Characters of Derivational
Suffix

Combine in arbitrary matter

Do not close off a word
Change the part of speech of the word to
which its added, but not all. It functions

To convert one part of speech to another

e.g. Beauty (n) + ful beautiful (adj)
En + rich (adj) enrich (verb)
To change the meaning of the root (Class
maintaining)
e.g. friend (n) + ship friendship (n)
ex + terminate (v) exterminate (v)

Characters of Derivational Suffix

Combine in arbitrary matter

Do not close off a word
Change the part of speech of the word to which
its added, but not all. It functions

to convert one part of speech to another

e.g. Beauty (n) + -ful beautiful (adj)
En- + rich (adj) enrich (verb)
to change the meaning of the root (class maintaining)
e.g. friend (n) + -ship friendship (n)
ex- + terminate (v) exterminate (v)

Characters of Inflectional Suffix

Do not Change part of speech

They come last in a word
Go with all stems of a given part of speech
Do not pile up; only ends a word
Always suffix
indicate grammatical meaning such as tense or number.
e.g. Book (n) + -s books
John (n) + s Johns
Foot + vowel change feet
Sing (V) + -s sings
Thin (adj) + -er thinner

Affixes (2)
There are three kinds of affixes (Based on
the position)
Prefix
e.g. un-, in-, dis-, pre-, etc
Infix
e.g. kuning kemuning (ind)
Suffix
e.g. ment, -al, -s, etc
Aya's prop/Int to Lin

Root, Base, & Stem

Root is usually a free morpheme
Base is a root plus associated derivational affixes, to
which derivational affixes are added
Stem is a root plus associated derivational affixes,
to which inflectional are added
e.g. en-gage-ment-s
____
root
_______
base
___________
stem

Allomorph

Predictable variants of morphemes

Morphemes which has the same function with slightly different
forms.
e.g. Phonologically conditioned
{pl} /-s/ cats
{neg} /il-/ illegal
/-z/ rings
/im-/ immobile
/-iz/ boxes
/in-/ incapable
/ir-/ irregular
{past} /-t/ slipped
/-d/ slammed
/-id/ stilted
Morphologically Condition

fish, sheep, deer

Vowel alteration mice, lice, geese
-en children, oxen
foreign plurals
-a phenomena, data, criteria
-i
stimuli, alumni
life-lives, etc.

Morphological Realization
Rules
Morphemes are realized by one of four Morphological realization rules;
Agglutinative Rule
Two morphemes are realized by Morphs which remain distinct and are simply
glued together
e.g. {BOOK}+{pl}>books
{WORK}+{past}>worked
Fusional Rule
Two morphemes are realized by morphs which do not remain distinct but are
fused together
e.g. {TOOTH}+{pl}>teeth
{WRITE}+{past}>wrote
Null Realization Rule
A morpheme is never realized as a morph in any word of relevant class
e.g. {sg} on nouns which never has concrete realization in
english
{WORK}+{pres}>work
Zero Rule
A morpheme is realized as a zero morph in particular members of a word class
e.g. {SHEEP}+{pl}>sheep
{PUT}+{Past}>put