MORPHOLOGY

    A.    What is Morphology?
 

Morphology comes from a Greek word meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form’ and is used in linguistics to denote the study of words, both with regard to their internal structure and their combination or formation to form new or larger units.  So, morphology is the study of the minimal meaningful units of language. It studies the structure of words, however from a semantic viewpoint rather than from the viewpoint of sound. Morphology is intimately related to syntax. For everything that is larger than a word is the domain of syntax.

    B.     Morphemes

morpheme is considered the smallest unit of meaning. For example,

live                  (verb)               man                 (noun)

live | ly            (adj)                 man | ly           (adj)

live | li | hood  (noun)              man | hood      (noun)

Although all morphemes are units of meaning, there are various kinds of morphemes.

Morphemes can be free or bound. If a morpheme is free, it can stand on its own; if it is bound, it must be attached to a free morpheme. In the word walking, the morpheme walk is free because it can stand alone as a word. However, -ing is bound because it has to be attached to a lexical verb, in this case walk. In the examples below, the free morphemes are in italics and the bound morphemes in boldface:

·         Force-ful                    

·         Miss-ed

·         Un-like-li-est

·         Dis-like

·         Pre-judge

·         Mis-inform-ation

    C.     allomorphys.

the term "allomorph" refers to a variant of a morpheme. An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments. For example :

rabbit(s)

cat(s)

hiss(es)

    D.    Zero Allomorph

It is a special kind of allomorph which has the form of a null morpheme. An example of zero allomorph in English is the phrase two fish-Ø which can also be two fish-es. In addition, the forms of many auxiliary verbs such as do may have null allomorphs, especially in children's language.

    E.     Inflection & Derivational Morphology

Bound of morphemes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflections are one type of grammatical morpheme, a morpheme that indicates some kind of grammatical relationship.

While inflectional morphemes form a small class in English, derivational morphemes are a much larger class. So derivational is an affix used to change form and meaning from a lexical point with a change in part of speech sometime as seen in the paradigms bellow :

Ambition                     (noun)

Ambitious                   (adj)

Ambitiousness             (noun)