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.

How baby words are made.

Modern English vocabulary is the result of the mixture of five major linguistic influences: 

1. Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

2. French (after 1066)

3. Norse (Vikings)

4. Latin and Greek (mostly from the late Middle Ages onwards)

5. Miscellaneous words borrowed from over 350 languages around the world

Additionally, nobody knows for sure how many new words appear in English each year. The only concrete figures are the words that dictionary makers add to the new editions of their dictionaries. (For example the 2007 edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary added about 2,500 new words to the edition published five years previously). However, we must remember that there are words not recorded anywhere or those invented on the spur of the moment, never used again and simply forgotten. Some areas of human activity such as computing are rich sources of new words. Here I would like to share with you a rather witty term, one of my favourites in this field, 'cobwebsite' which describes a website that hasn't been updated for a long time. Other ones include 'data smog' - the overwhelming amount and excess of the information on the Internet and 'linkrot' - situation when links on a given website don't work or lead you nowhere. One of the least common processes of word formation in English is coinage.

These days we are all stressed and we often go into a rage over anything. While driving we are irritated by other motorists who deliberately slow us down, triggering road rage. Don't feel bad about yourself though - if you think motorists are bad this means you never walk anywhere - pavement rage is probably worse... We all hate trolley rage when we just can't get through to the shelf we need in a supermarket because everybody else seems to need exactly what we need too. Not to mention spam rage, phone rage or tube rage. The movie 'Falling down' springs to mind.

Contrastingly, borrowing is probably one of the most common sources of new words in English, that is the adoption of words from other languages - 'piano' is Italian, 'robot' is Czech and ''yoghurt' is Turkish. Me and my fellow Poles talk about 'sport', 'klub', 'pub' and many others. A special type of borrowing is calque - direct translation of the elements of a word. Here, the English word 'superman' is a loan translation of the German 'Uebermensch' - I hope you speak German and if you do please compare words 'Woklenkratzer' or 'Lehnwort' with their English versions...

The most common word - formation process is derivation. Affixes such as '-ful', '-less', '-ish', 'un-'. 'in-', 'mis-' etc are added to the end (suffixes) or beggining of words (prefixes) and change their meaning. Infixes are not normally to be found in English and as a name suggests it's an affix likely to be located in the middle of the word. The witty but rather vulgar 'Absofuckinglutely' might ring a bell. 'Fucking' in that case isn't strictly speaking an affix, I only just gave this example because I thought it was funny.

If you are to take only the beginning of one word and the ending of the other, then connect them and use as a word with a new meaning - this is called blending. Motor + Hotel = Motel. Breakfast + Lunch = Brunch. (By the way, not many of you might know that word brekfast means to break the fast... again - word formation. Crazy, isn't it?) If you feel like shortening a word and instead of saying 'advertisement' you go for 'ad' this means you are clipping words. This is exactly why we talk about 'bra', 'cab', 'flu', 'gym' and many others, not to mention names such as Sam, Al, Liz etc.

Now, 'donate' comes from 'donation' and is an effect of backformation, the slightly different type of reduction process. Other examples include: 'babysit' from 'babysitter' and 'opt' from 'option'.

Hypocorisms are those words with '-y' or '-ie' in the end such as 'barbie' for 'barbeque' and 'telly' for 'television' (I dislike that one as it sounds rather pretentious). This is especially typical for British and Australian English.

Some words are known as acronyms and consist of the initial letters from a sequence of words. CD is a 'compact disc'. We also have VCR, NASA, NATO, FBI, CIA and many others. I'm ashamed to admit but I tend to follow the crowd and overuse the word 'LOL'. If a noun comes to be used as a verb we talk about conversion.

'Paper', 'butter', 'bottle' and many others are nouns which can be used as verbs. "Have you buttered your toast yet?'.