Morphology

What is morhology? ‘Morphology’ literally stands for ‘ the study of forms’ and was originally used in biology but since the middle of 19th century it’s been used to describe the analysis of basic elements used in a given language. Those ‘elements’ are technically referred to as morphemes. Let's take forms: talks, talker, talked, talking. They consist of one element talk and a variety of other elements (-s, -er, -ed and -ing). The latter are described as 'morphemes'.

What is a morpheme? What is a stem? Morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. For example, word reopened consists of 3 morphemes. One minimal unit of meaning open, another minimal unit of meaning re- (here meaning 'again') and a minimal unit of grammatical function -ed (past tense). Word tourists consists of 3 morphemes too: tour – ist – s. In those examples, open and tour are free morphemes and they stand by themselves as single words whereas re-, -ed, ist and -s are bound morphemes and cannot stand alone but are always attached to another form. (See 'affixes' in one of my previous post). When free morphemes are used with bound morphemes the basic word-form involved is technically known as ‘stem’. Problem and disagreement occur over the characterisation of elements such as receive or repeat (since even though re- is often a prefix, -ceive and -peat aren’t free morphemes – because they don’t stand by themselves and don't carry any meaning on their own). You may come across a variety of terms used to describe those. The simplest distinction would be here to count ceive and peat as bound stems and forms like dress in undressed or care in careless as free stems.

Classification of morphemes

1. Free morphemes

a) Lexical morphemes

Those are a set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that carry the content of ‘message’ we convey such as monkey, stupid, read.

b) Functional morphemes

Those are functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. We hardly ever add new functional morphemes to the language; they’re described as a ‘closed’ class of words.

2. Bound morphemes

a) Derivational morphemes Those are used to make new words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For instance derivational morpheme -ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness and -ly changes the adjective slow to the adverb slowly. Other common derivational morphemes in English are -ish, -ly, -ment, re-, pre-, dis-, co-, un-

b) Inflectional morphemes

Those indicate aspects of the grammatical function but don’t make new words.

English has only 8 inflectional morphemes: possessive: Jim’s, plural: sisters, 3rd person: likes, present participle: singing, past tense: danced, past participle: taken, superlative: longest, comparative: shorter. They never change the grammatical category of a word (short and shorter are both adjectives). All of the above are suffixes. Note that -er can be either derivational or inflectional morpheme: teach – teacher/small – smaller. They look the same but they have different function. They are both bound morphemes. Also, whenever there are both derivational and inflectional suffix added to the word, the derivational suffix appears first: teach -er  -s (never: teach -s -er).

ProblemsWhat is the inflectional morpheme that makes sheep the plural form of sheep or mice of mouse? Why is went a past form of go? Those have not been fully resolved. On the bright side, we know that the relationship between law and legal is a reflection of historical influence of other languages (law from Old Norse and legal from Latin). There is no derivational relationship between the two.

Analogy with processes known in phonology If phones are phonetic realisations of phonemes we can propose morphs as realisations of morphemes. Cat is a single morph realising a lexical morpheme whereas cats consists of two morphs realising a lexical morpheme (cat) and an inflectional morpheme (-s plural). Just as we noted there were ‘allophones’ of a particular phoneme we can now recognise allomorphs of a particular morpheme. Lexical morpheme cat + inflectional morpheme plural = cats, lexical morpheme sheep + inflectional morpheme plural = sheep. In result the actual morphs resulting from single morpheme turn out to be different but they are all allomorphs of the same morpheme.