2-11-2016 MORPHOLOGY

Morphology

Morphology is the study of word formation and the internal structure of words. morphology. This term, which literally 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 type of investigation that analyzes all those basic ‘elements’ used in a language. What we have been describing as ‘elements’ in the form of a linguistic message are technically known as ‘morphemes’.

Morphemes

 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. In the sentence The police reopened the investigation, the word reopened consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit of meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is re- (meaning ‘again’) and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed (indicating past tense). The word tourists also contains three morphemes. There is one minimal unit of meaning tour, another minimal unit of meaning -ist (marking ‘person who does something’), and a minimal unit of grammatical function -s (indicating plural).

Classification of Morphemes

Free and bound morphemes

 There are free morphemes, that is, morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for example, open and tour. There are also bound morphemes,which are those forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. 

Lexical and functional morphemes

What we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that we think of as the words that carry the ‘content’ of the messages we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes and some examples are: girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look, follow, break. We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily, so they are treated as an ‘open’ class of words. 

Other types of free morphemes are called functional morphemes. Examples are and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a ‘closed’ class of words.