MORPHOLOGY

MORPHOLOGY - the study of MORPHEMES –  building  building elements used to form composite words or grammatical grammatical units;

- Q: Which is the smallest meaningful unit in language? re-open-ed meaning

meaning

'again'

grammatical function

'open'

'past tense'

- free morphemes can stand by themselves as single words: wo rds: ROOT vs. BASE

'a

red│head│ed girl'

root

affix

root

base

- Q: How do we call words consisting co nsisting of two or more roots, e.g. 'blackbird'? Lexical morphemes : open class of words - Free morphemes Functional morphemes (conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns): closed class of words

- bound m moorphemes are not independent; attached to other forms: AFFIXES (prefixes, suffixes, infixes) - STEM

is the basic word-form (free morpheme) used with bound morphemes :

un prefix

dress

stem

-ed suffix

care

stem

-less suffix

-ness suffix

- Q: What is the stem in Latin cor, cordis, n. ? And what is the base in Croatian udžbenik ? - CLITICS are contracted forms dependent on a host root morpheme: I 've...He's... - ALLOMORPHS realisations of a morpheme that are in complementary distribution to each other: [s], [z], [iz] → PLURAL MORPHEME or MORPH (a phonetic realization of a morpheme)

- Q: What would we list as allomorphs of the morpheme PLURAL from this set of English words: dogs, oxen, deer, judges, curricula?

- DERIVATIONAL morphemes are used in forming new lexemes or derived words; restricted in their application to a certain group of word stems → LEXIS black – en ('make someone black')

 pur – ify ('make sth. pure')

 serv – er ('one who serves')

 serv – ant ('one who serves')

*beautiless vs beatiful 

- INFLECTIONAL morphemes are used to form grammatical constructions; can be applied to all the members of a given category → SYNTAX  Let me tell you about Jim's two sister s. One likes to have fun and is always laughing . The other lik ed to study and has always tak en things seriously. One is the loud est person in the house and the other is quiet er than a mouse.

- Q: Can you think of a way to state the rule that will accomodate all the examples given here? teethmarks clawmarks *clawsmarks lice-infested roach-infested *roaches-infested

the feet-cruncher   the finger-cruncher   *the fingers-cruncher   mice-infested   rat-infested   *rats-infested  

Readings: Dirven, R., M. Verspoor (2004) 'Meaningful building blocks'. In: Dirven, R., M. Verspoor (2004). Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 49-75. Poole, S.C. (1999) ' Morphology'. In: Poole, S.C. (1999) An Introduction to Linguistics.Hampshire/New York:Palgrave. 73-82. Yule, G. (1996). 'Morphology'. In: Yule, G. (1996). The Study of Language. CUP. 74-85.