chapter 2.ppt

Morphological Structure of English Words Morphemes Morpheme: the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language, not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms. friend/friendly/friendliness Morph: the smallest sequence of phonological units into which words are divided in an analysis of morphemes. friend /frend/, friendly /frend/+/li/, friendliness /frend/+/li/+/nis/ Allomorphs: any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds. books /s/, bags /z/, matches /iz/ worked /t/, tried /d/, wanted /id/ Classification of Morphemes Free morphemes and bound morphemes: Free morpheme: morpheme that can be uttered alone with meaning. Bound morpheme: A bound morpheme cannot stand by itself as a complete utterance; it must appear with at least one other morpheme, free or bound. Roots and affixes: Roots: A root is the basic unchangeable part of a word, and it conveys the main lexical meaning of the word. Free roots: Bound roots: tain as in contain, detain, retain dict as in predict, contradict Affixes: Affix is a collective term for the type of formative that can be used only when added to another morpheme. Inflectional affixes and derivational affixes: Inflectional affixes: Inflectional affixes serve to express such meanings as plurality, tense, and the comparative or superlative degree. It does not form a new word with new lexical meaning when it is added to another word. Nor does it change the word-class of the word to which it is affixed. Inflectional affixes include: the plural marker (s, es, en, etc.) the genitive case (’s) the verbal endings (s, ing, ed, etc.) the comparative and the superlative degrees (er, est) Derivational affixes: Definition: When derivational affixes are added to another morpheme, they derive a new word. Features: Many derivational affixes have a specific lexical meaning, e.g. mono-, inter-, anti-, etc. Quite a number of derivational affixes have more than one meaning, e.g. over- (overhead, overwork). Deriva