CHAPTER 2

BASIC CONCEPTS

As a part of linguistic competences, morphology is known as a system of categories and

rules which is involving the ability to construct and interpret words in particular native
language. This chapter presents the basic concepts of morphology in general. There are some
related concepts and few terms which can be used as the fundamental foundation in the
morphological process.
1. Lexemes and word-forms
The most familiar concept in morphology is ‘word’. Generally, word is defined as a single
distinct meaningful element which can be formed in both spoken and written forms. In
written forms, words are separated by spaces between a contiguous sequence of letters. As
a fundamental thing in creating the sequence of letters, commonly, the notion of ‘word’ is
divided into three general terms; lexeme, word-form, and word token.
A lexeme is known as the core of word-forms. In the other words, it is a word in an
abstract sense. In linguistics, a lexeme is the fundamental unit of lexicon which stands
alone without any intercalation of affixes or any inflectional endings. It can be assumed
that lexeme is established independently but it can be a basic of any word-forms which has
similar or perfectly same forms with the lexeme itself. Most dictionaries are administered
to lexemes, it may be assumed that lexemes are corresponding to dictionary words.
Commonly, a lexeme is labelled in a capitalized form. For example, RUN is a lexeme of
word-forms run, ran, running, runs. A lexeme has no phonological form in its form.
Regarding to the example of RUN, it has no phonological form as same as a word-form
run /rǝn/.
If a lexeme is an abstract sense of word, conversely, a word-form is a word in concrete
sense (i.e. in the real perception). It is a combination of a lexeme and its grammatical
meaning or grammatical functions. A word-form has its own phonological form which is
known as a sound of the word itself. For example, live /liv/ is a word-form of a lexeme
LIVE which has a grammatical function as a verb of first or second-person singular/plural
present tense. When a word-form(s) is used in particular speech or written texts, it is
labelled as word token. Hence, in a sentence such “The most familiar concept in
morphology is ‘word”, there are eight word tokens, eight word-forms, and eight lexemes.
In addition, a set of word-forms which originate from a lexeme, it is known as paradigm.
The term of paradigm refers to the change of word-form that is involving some different

1
cases which describe the relationship among one noun with the verb or other nouns in the
sentence. The different cases include nominative (subject), accusative (indicates dāirect
object), genitive (possession), dative (indicates indirect object), locative (place or location)
and ablative (move away from). Here some examples of different paradigm in Turkish
noun lexeme EV ‘house’ and Latin noun lexeme INSULA ‘island’ cases:
(1)
a) The paradigm in EV
Nominative : ev-Ø “the house”
Accusative : ev-i “the house”
Dative : ev-e “the house”
Genitive : ev-in “the house’s”
Ablative : ev-den “from the house”
Locative : ev-de “in the house”

b) The paradigm in INSULA

Singular Plural
Nominative : insula insulae
Accusative : insulam insulās
Genitive : insulae insulārum
Dative : insulae insulīs
Ablative : insulā insulīs

Regarding to the two examples of paradigm above, each of them shares the
morphological relationship of a set of different word-forms with a particular lexeme EV
and INSULA. However, in morphology, there is another term that should be taken into
account which explains about the relationship of a set of different lexemes. This term is
well-known as a word family or a lexeme family. For instance, let’s take a look on the
English word families below.
(2)
a) READ, READABLE, UNREADABLE, READER, READABILITY, REREAD
b) LOGIC, LOGICIAN, LOGICAL, ILLOGICAL, ILLOGICALITY

The question is ‘how can we account these complex word/lexeme families?’. First,
recall that lexemes are corresponding to dictionary words, and in the relation to examples

2
 of word family above, it can be assumed that each lexeme refers to different lexical entry
including its different meaning in the dictionary due to their less predictable conditions.
For examples, the lexeme ILLOGICALITY is organized differently with lexeme LOGIC
in the dictionary. It can be proved if you observe it in the Oxford Dictionary. The same
things also occur on the other examples of lexemes families above. In addition, there is a
fact that the meaning of complex lexemes is unpredictable. For example, a lexeme
READER, conventionally, is interpreted as someone/somebody who reads, but,
unpredictably, it refers to a senior teacher at a British university just below the rank of a
professor. See the dictionary for further information about different meaning of complex
lexemes such above.
Second, complex lexemes represent new concepts that are different from the simple
lexeme concepts. The process of creating a new lexeme for a new concept is called as
derivation which is at cross purposes with inflection (i.e. a process to create different
forms with a same lexeme). Hence, we can predict that a lexeme READER is derived from
the lexeme READ, LOGICAL is derived from LOGIC, and so on.
Another common way to build some complex words is involving a process called
compounding. It refers to the combination of two (or more) word families (lexemes
families) to create a complex word which has a new lexical category from its origins.
Compounding can be formed under the derivation process of word formation or lexeme
formation. Here some examples of compounding:
No Compounding Word/Lexeme Families Combination
1 FIREWOOD (N) FIRE (N) + WOOD (N)
2 FIREENGINE (N) FIRE (N) + ENGINE (N)
3 GREENHOUSE (N) GREEN (A) + HOUSE (N)
4 OVERLOOK (V) OVER (P) + LOOK (V)
5 SKYBLUE (A) SKY (N) + BLUE (A)
Table 1. Examples of compunding

2. Affixes, bases, and roots

Morphologically, language has a variety of operations that can modify a word’s structure,
either by adding some external elements or by making an internal change. Regarding to
the previous explanation about derivation and inflection, obviously, we can see the
different form particular words by comparing its original lexemes with some parts
involved. Some elements which are involved in the process of morphological change of

3
language, generally, may be divided into; affixes, bases, and roots. This section will
present and illustrate the differences between affixes, bases, and roots.
A term of affixes refers to any kind of morphemes – either short or long morpheme –
which is attached to particular part of word-forms, whereas the part of word in which an
affix is attached is called as base. Commonly, the process of adding affixes to base or main
part of words is called as affixation (O’Grady, 1997: 117). In the other words, affixation
is a morphological process to create different forms of word-form which originates from
the one lexeme. The types of affixes are divided into four; Prefix, Suffix, Infix, and
Circumfix. An affix that is attached in the front of the base (i.e. preceding the base) is
known as prefix whereas an affix that follows the base is called suffix. There are two other
less common types of affixes are infix (i.e. affixes that occur inside/within the base) and
circumfix, a type of affixes that is attached on both sides of the base. The examples of
affixes of some languages are illustrated in the table below.
Types of affixes Examples
Prefix English de- in deactivate or in- as in inaccurate
Nathuatl amo- in amo-cal ‘your house’
Suffix English -ly in vividly
Russian -a in ruk-a ‘hand’
Infix Tagalog -um- in t-um-akbuh ‘ran’
Circumfix German ge-…-en in gefahren ‘driven
Indonesian me-…-kan in memalukan ‘shameful’
Table 2. Types of affixes

In the table above, it shows some examples of affixes according to the inflectional
paradigm. Recall that inflection is a morphological process in creating a different form of
the same lexeme. In terms of affixation, the process of inflection creates a new different
form of particular word-form without changing its lexical category by involving suffix or
prefixes. For instance, Verb activate is changed into a different form of Verb deactivate in
English. Furthermore, in contrast to inflectional affixes, there is a term of derivational
affixes that is defined as a morphological process to create a new form of a typical word-
form which has different lexical category as the origins. In English, the derivational affixes
involve suffixes. For further examples of English derivational affixes, let’s take a look at
the table below.

4
 Affixes Change of lexical category Examples
Suffixes -able V–A Fixable, doable, understandable
-ant V–N Claimant, defendant
-(at)ion V–N Realization, assertion, protection
-er V–N Teacher, worker, reader, writer
-ing V–N/V–A The dancing (N), a blazing fire (A)
-ive V–A Assertive, impressive, restrictive
-ment V–N Treatment, measurement, amazement
-ful N–A Hopeful, peaceful, faithful
-(i)al N–A National, presidential
-less N–A Brainless, hopeless, jobless
-ic N–A Optimistic, cubic, moronic
-ous N–A Poisonous, luxurious
-ate A–V Activate, captivate
-ity A–N Priority, curiosity
-ize A–V Nationalize, capitalize
-ness A–N Happiness, sadness, kindness
-en A–V Blacken, harden
-ly A – ADV Slowly, happily, carefully
Adopted from O’Grady’s Contemporary Linguistics (1997:123)
Table 3. English derivational affixes
Besides derivational affixes, there are some inflectional affixes in English. There are
eight inflectional affixes (all suffixes) in English as illustrated in the Table 4 below.
Nouns
Plural -s The books
Possessive –‘s John’s car
Verbs
3rd person singular present -s Marry loves John
Progressive -ing My uncle is singing
Past tense -ed He worked
Past participle -en/-ed Marry has eaten/finished
Adjectives
Comparative -er The smaller one
Superlative -est The tallest one
Table 4. English inflectional affixes

5
 Moreover, in the process of creating a word-form, the distribution of roots is important
to be identified as well as affixes and bases. In some cases, base and root are similar or
absolutely same. Let’s take an example of a complex word-form readability. If we take a
look into that word-form, it consists of three part or component morphemes. In readability,
the read is the root of readable, -ity is a suffix which combines with base readable.
Therefore, those three morphemes create a word-form readability which is classified as a
Noun. From that example, it can be seen that read is unable to be analyzed or divided into
constituent morpheme, hence, it can be generalized that read is a root, and a root is the
core of the word and it cannot be broken down into other morphemes. A root may belong
to a lexical category, whether Adjective, Noun, Verb, or Preposition. Unlike roots, affixes
do not belong to any kind of lexical categories, meanwhile base do.
For further illustration of the difference between roots, affixes, and bases, here an
example that is depicted as tree diagrams of word-form blackened.
(3) Blackened
V
V
A Af Af
black en ed

3. Morphemes and Allomorph

In the previous section, we have explained three different component morphemes–affixes,
bases, and roots–which are establishing the word-forms including inflectional and
derivational processes. The structure of a word is filled by parts of words with different
meanings which is morphologically called as morpheme. Morphemes refer to the smallest
meaningful constituents of a linguistic expression (in this case, a linguistic expression can
be understood as a word-form). Word-forms may consist of one or more than one
morpheme and it can be illustrated as a root or base or affixes of word-forms. Here some
examples of morpheme in English:
(4)
 Read Read-s Read-er Read-ing
 Wash Wash-es Wash-er Wash-ing
 Kind kind-ness un-kind
 Active Active-ate de-active-ate

6
 According to examples above, the distribution of morphemes can be seen from the
individual meaningful parts: read + s, wash + ing, read + er, un + kind, and so forth.
Since the generalization that morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words, it
cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts anymore. A word reads consists of two
morphemes, read and s. It is not possible to break down the morpheme read into smaller
parts such as re + ad because these morphemes are meaningless. Furthermore, the
distribution of morphemes also occurs in a long sentence such ‘The visitors are not allowed
to feed that panda’ such The/visit/or/s/are/not/allow/ed/to/feed/that/panda or
The/visitor/s/are/not/allow/ed/to/feed/that/panda. It is impossible to divide the word
panda into its smaller parts (e.g. pan and da) because they do not share meaning each
other. When a morpheme is unable to be broken down into some smaller parts, it is called
as monomorphemic.
In addition to the phenomenon of monomorphemic, morphemes may have some
variants in its distribution in particular word-forms. Morphologically, the variations of
morpheme are defined as allomorphs. In English, there are two types of indefinite articles
such as a and an. The co-occurrence of these articles may be influenced by typical
environments such: (1) the form a may co-occur with word-forms beginning with
consonant sounds or letters in the word-initial position, whereas (2) the form an appears
before words beginning with vowel sounds or letters. These phenomena may be related to
the phonological aspects of words in English. In short, the further explanation of allomorph
in this section will be labelled as phonological allomorphs.
Another type of allomorph can be found as in the example of pronunciation of suffix -
s in typical words such as cats, dogs, and judges. Phonologically, it may occur under
particular circumstances or influenced by the environments which is immediately
preceding the [s] such as a voiceless consonant [t] as in ‘cats’, a voiced consonant [g] as
in ‘dogs’ and ‘judges’. Therefore, the suffix -s may be pronounced as /s/ in cats, /z/ in
dogs, and /ǝz/ in judges.
The phenomenon of allomorph in English may also co-occur with the roots and bases,
not only with affixes. As same as previous explanations about the distribution of indefinite
articles a and an or suffix -s with typical word-forms, the differences of allomorph co-
occurrence with roots or bases also may be affected by the preceding or following
environments. For instance, English verbs roots such as sleep, keep, deal, mean, feel which
are pronounced by using a long vowel [i:], change into a short vowel [ɛ] as in slept, kept,
dealt, meant, felt due to the immediately following voiceless consonant [t]. The case of
7
allomorph in the base of words can be found as in the following examples of German or
Russian in the table below.
German: a voiced obstruent becomes voiceless in the word-final position
Tage [ta:gǝ] ‘days’ Tag [ta:k] ‘day’
German
Lose [lo:zǝ] ‘lots’ Los [lo:s] ‘lot’
Russian: when a base is followed by a vowel-initial suffix, the last vowel in the
base such as o/e is omitted.
zamok ‘castle’ zamk-i ‘castles’
Russian
kamen’ ‘stone’ kamn-i ‘stones’
Table 5. Allomorph in German and Russian
Examples of allomorph such the German bases/stems [ta:k] and [ta:gǝ] or [lo:s] and
[lo:zǝ] occur in different environments although they share the same meaning.
Phonologically, the type of distribution such in German above is known as
complementary distribution, because they complement each other and appear in
mutually exclusive environments (i.e. the environments which are allowed to follow
particular sounds). If we take a deep look at the examples of the German bases/stems [ta:k]
and [ta:gǝ] or [lo:s] and [lo:zǝ], we can analyze that voiced obstruent [g] or [z] can appear
before [ǝ] in the final position, whereas the presence of voiceless [k] and [s] exclude [ǝ] in
the final position.
Linguists often describe the change operation of underlying representation (UR), for
examples [ta:gǝ] or [lo:zǝ], to become the surface representation (SR) of [ta:k] or [lo:s]
with a set of morphological rules that can be represented as “X Y in the
environment/rule of “. The arrow ( ) means “turns/changes into”, X refers to “UR”,
Y means “SR”, and “in the environment/rule of” refers to the specific environments or
rules in which X is rewritten as Y. The representation of this rule can be shown as follows:
(5) UR /ta:g/ ‘day.SG’
Rule a voiced obstruent becomes voiceless in syllable-final position
(application: [ta:g] [ta:k])
SR [ta:k] ‘day.SG’
(6) UR [zamok-i] ‘castle-PL’
Rule when a base is followed by a vowel-initial suffix, the last vowel
in the base such as o/e is omitted.
(application: [zamok-i] [zamk-i])
SR [zamk-i] ‘castle-PL’

8
 The examples of allomorph in English, German, and Russian above show that the
phonological allomorphs are represented only in a single morpheme. Overall, we can see
that the difference of allomorphs depends some rules or environments (preceding or
following or both) in the field of phonology. The use of morphological rules as in (5) and
(6) gives a brief explanation how and in what way the underlying representation (UR) can
be changed into surface representation (SR).
Not all allomorphs can be formed in a single morpheme which is similar with one to
other allomorphs. Graphically, some allomorphs can be formed differently from the
general forms and of course it will be not pronounced as same as the basic forms. And
these phenomena, exactly, in contrast with the phonological allomorphs as in previous
section. Morphologically, it is known as suppletive allomorphs (i.e. allomorphs that are
not similar in pronunciation overall). Suppletive allomorph or suppletion can be defined
as a morphological process that replaces or change the whole or some parts of a morpheme
by another different form of morpheme in order to indicate a grammatical contrast. The
term of suppletion may occur in some languages such English, French, Spanish, German,
and Russian. Generally, suppletion is divided into two types; weak suppletion (change
some parts or similar) and strong suppletion (change whole parts). The examples of
suppletions in some languages can be illustrated as in Table 5 below.
Languages Basic forms Suppletive forms
English Go Went Strong Suppletion
Good Better
Is Was
Are Were
Buy Bought Weak Suppletion
Think Thought
Catch Caught
Spanish ir ‘go’ va Strong Suppletion
French avoir ‘to have’ eu ‘had’ Strong Suppletion
German ist ‘is’ sind ‘are’ Strong Suppletion
Russian xorofo ‘good’ lutffe ‘better’ Strong Suppletion
Table 5. Suppletives forms in languages

In terms of describing the appearances of allomorphs (both suppletive and phonological

allomorphs) in some languages such above, there is a fundamental thing that should be
taken for account in determining the allomorphs, and it refers to the conditions that may

9
differ the allomorphs selection. Typically, there are three conditioning of the allomorph
selections such as phonological conditioning, morphological conditioning, and lexical
conditioning. Phonological conditioning refers to the choice of allomorphs regarding to
the phonological context. For instance, the difference of plural allomorphs [s] which may
be pronounced as [s] as in cats, [z] in dogs, and [ǝz] in judges as influenced by the
environments. Later, morphological conditioning means the allomorph selection depends
on the morphological context (usually involving the grammatical function either). For
example, English go in the present tense, and went in the past tense or gone in the past
participle. The last but not least, we must take a look on the lexical conditioning. Regarding
to this condition, the choice of allomorphs depends on the individual lexical item. It means
that the selection of allomorph based on the properties or features that are immediately
following the base. For instance, the choice of English past participle suffix -en or -ed must
be referring to the individual verbs that are possible to take these suffixes. In English, some
verbs such bite, drive, get, and beat are allowed to take suffix -en to make it become bitten,
driven, gotten, and beaten respectively. Meanwhile, some verbs such walk, paint, work,
and dance may take suffix -ed become walked, painted, worked, and danced.
Overall, it can be concluded that this chapter presents the basic concepts of morphology
in general. There are some related concepts and few terms which can be used as the
fundamental foundation in the morphological process. Three different ideas of word–such
word token, lexeme, and word-form–have been distinguished clearly complete with their
own examples. The concept of derivation describes the process of creating a new lexeme
for a new concept. Conversely, inflectional refers to a process to create different forms
with a same lexeme. Morphologically, language has a variety of operations that can modify
a word’s structure, either by adding some external elements or by making an internal
change. Some elements which are involved in the process of morphological change of
language, generally, may be divided into; affixes (suffix, prefix, infix, and circumfix),
bases, and roots. Word-forms may not only in simple words, but also complex words.
Morphologically, the variations of morpheme are defined as allomorphs which are divided
into phonological and suppletive allomorphs. Typically, there are three conditioning of the
allomorph selections such as phonological conditioning, morphological conditioning, and
lexical conditioning.

10