Morphology

Linguistic Foundations

Morphology

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Types of Free Morphemes

Types of Morphemes

Morphology and Morpheme

Types of Bound Morphemes

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MORPHOLOGY AND MORPHEME

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Morphology: This term means “the study of forms”. Was originally used in biology, but since the middle of the nineteenth century has also been used to describe the study of all those basic “elements” used in a language.

The definition of a morpheme is “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.” Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural, for example.

TYPES OF MORPHEMES

Free and Bound Morphemes

Free morphemes: morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for example, new and tour. Bound morphemes: forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s.

TYPES OF FREE MORPHEMES

LEXICAL AND FUNCTIONAL MORPHEMES

What we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns (girl, house), verbs (break, sit), adjectives (long, sad), and adverbs (never, quickly) that we think of as the words that carry the “content” of the messages we convey. These free forms are called lexical morphemes. Other types of free morphemes are called functional morphemes. Examples are articles (a, the), conjunctions (and, because), prepositions (on, near) and pronouns (it, me). Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a “closed” class of words.

TYPES OF BOUND MORPHEMES

Derivational Morphemes

We use these bound forms to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For example, the addition of the derivational morpheme -ment changes the verb encourage to the noun encouragement.

Inflectional Morphemes

These are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form. English has only eight inflectional morphemes, all suffixes.

Other languages

ILOCANO

KANURI

GANDA

If we learn that abalenzi is a Ganda plural, meaning “boys,” then we can be pretty sure that the singular form meaning “boy” must be omulenzi.

Taltálon (“fields”) and the singular (“field”) would be tálon.

Kanuri word for “length” is nəmkurugu, then we can be sure that “long” is kurugu.

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RESUME

Lexical Morphemes

MORPHOLOGY

FREE MORPHEMES

Functional Morphemes

MORPHOLOGY AND MORPHEMES

Derivational Morphemes

MORPHEMES

BOUND MORPHEMES

Inflectional Morphemes

QUIZ TIME

QUIZ TIME

QUESTION 1

How many morphemes are there in the word “terrorists”?

CORRECT

The word "terrorists" can be broken down into three morphemes: 1. "terror" - conveying the concept of fear or extreme intimidation. 2. "-ist" - a suffix indicating a person who practices or supports a particular activity or belief. 3. "-s" - a suffix indicating pluralization in this context. So, in total, there are three morphemes in the word "terrorists."

QUIZ TIME

QUESTION 2

What kind of morpheme is the suffix in slowly?

DERIVATIONAL

INFLECTIONAL

LEXICAL

CORRECT

In this case, "-ly" modifies the adjective "slow," transforming it into an adverb, indicating how something is done (slowly).

QUIZ TIME

QUESTION 3

In Indonesian, the singular form translating “child” is anak and the plural form (“children”) is anakanak. What is the technical term used to describe this relationship?

ADDED TERM

REDUPLICATION

DOESN'T HAVE A TECHNICAL TERM

CORRECT

The technical term used to describe the relationship between the singular and plural forms of a word like "anak" (child) and "anak-anak" (children) in Indonesian is "reduplication."

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