Chapter 3: Morphology

Introduction

Language is a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by

means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture,
express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of
identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

Linguistics, on the other hand, is the scientific study of language. The word was first
used in the middle of the 19th century to emphasize the difference between a newer approach
to the study of language that was then developing and the more traditional approach of
philology (the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their
authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning). The differences
were and are largely matters of attitude, emphasis, and purpose. The philologist is concerned
primarily with the historical development of languages as it is manifest in written texts and in the
context of the associated literature and culture. The linguist, though he may be interested in
written texts and in the development of languages through time, tends to give priority to spoken
languages and to the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.

Then our main topic which is Morphology, in linguistics, is study of the internal
construction of words. Languages vary widely in the degree to which words can be analyzed
into word elements, or morphemes (q.v.). In English there are numerous examples, such as
“replacement,” which is composed of re-, “place,” and -ment, and “walked,” from the elements
“walk” and -ed. Many American Indian languages have a highly complex morphology; other
languages, such as Vietnamese or Chinese, have very little or none. Morphology includes the
grammatical processes of inflection (q.v.) and derivation. Inflection marks categories such as
person, tense, and case; e.g., “sings” contains a final -s, marker of the 3rd person singular, and
the German Mannes consists of the stem Mann and the genitive singular inflection -es.
Derivation is the formation of new words from existing words; e.g., “singer” from “sing” and
“acceptable” from “accept.” Derived words can also be inflected: “singers” from “singer.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/morphology-linguistics

A. Words

What is a word? It seems almost silly to ask such a simple question, but if you think
about it, the question doesn’t have an obvious answer. A famous linguist named Ferdinand de
Saussure said that a word is like a coin because it has two sides to it that can never be
separated. One side of this metaphorical coin is the form of a word: the sounds (or letters) that
combine to make the spoken or written word. The other side of the coin is the meaning of the
word: the image or concept we have in our mind when we use the word. So a word is something
that links a given form with a given meaning.

Linguists have also noticed that words behave in a way that other elements of mental
grammar don’t because words are free. What does it mean for a word to be free? One
observation that leads us to say that words are free is that they can appear in isolation, on their
own. In ordinary conversation, we don’t often utter just a single word, but there are plenty of
contexts in which a single word is indeed an entire utterance. Here are some examples:

What are you doing? Cooking.

 What are you cooking? Soup.

How does it taste? Delicious.

Can I have some? No.

Each of those single words is perfectly grammatical standing in isolation as the answer
to a question.

Another reason we say that words are free is that they’re moveable: they can occupy a
whole variety of different positions in a sentence. Look at these examples:

Penny is making soup.

Soup is delicious.

I love to eat soup when it’s cold outside.

The word soup can appear as the last word in a sentence, as the first word, or in the
middle of a sentence. It’s free to be moved around.

The other important observation we can make about words is that they’re inseparable:
We can’t break them up by putting other pieces inside them. For example, in the sentence,

Penny cooked some carrots.

The word carrot has a bit of information added to the end of it to show that there’s more
than one carrot. But that bit of information can’t go just anywhere: it can’t interrupt the word
carrot:

*Penny cooked some car-s-rot.

This might seem like a trivial observation – of course, you can’t break words up into bits!
– but if we look at a word that’s a little more complex than carrots we see that it’s an important
insight. What about:

Penny bought two vegetable peelers.

That’s fine, but it’s totally impossible to say:

*Penny bought two vegetables peeler.

Even though she probably uses the peeler to peel multiple vegetables. It’s not that a
plural -s can’t go on the end of the word vegetable; it’s that the word vegetable peeler is a single
word (even though we spell it with a space between the two parts of it). And because it’s a
single word, it’s inseparable, so we can’t add anything else into the middle of it.
https://essentialsoflinguistics.pressbooks.com/chapter/6-2-words-and-morphemes/
B. Parts of Speech

All words belong to categories called word classes (or parts of speech) according to the
part they play in a sentence. The main word classes in English are listed below.

Noun is a word that identifies:

a person (man, girl, engineer, friend)

a thing (horse, wall, flower, country)
an idea, quality, or state (anger, courage, life, luckiness)

Verb describes what a person or thing does or what happens. For example, verbs
describe:

an action – jump, stop, explore

an event – snow, happen
a situation – be, seem, have
a change – evolve, shrink, widen

Adjective is a word that describes a noun, giving extra information about it. For example:

an exciting adventure
a green apple
a tidy room

Adverb is a word that’s used to give information about a verb, adjective, or other adverb.
They can make the meaning of a verb, adjective, or other adverb stronger or weaker, and often
appear between the subject and its verb (She nearly lost everything.)

Pronoun s are used in place of a noun that is already known or has already been
mentioned. This is often done in order to avoid repeating the noun. For example:

Laura left early because she was tired.

Anthony brought the avocados with him.
That is the only option left.
Something will have to change.

Personal pronouns are used in place of nouns referring to specific people or things, for
example I, me, mine, you, yours,his, her, hers, we, they, or them. They can be divided into
various different categories according to their role in a sentence, as follows:

subjective pronouns
objective pronouns
possessive pronouns
reflexive pronouns

Preposition is a word such as after, in, to, on, and with. Prepositions are usually used in
front of nouns or pronouns and they show the relationship between the noun or pronoun and
other words in a sentence. They describe, for example, the position of something, the time when
something happens, or the way in which something is done.

Conjunction (also called a connective) is a word such as and, because, but, for, if, or,
and when. Conjunctions are used to connect phrases, clauses, and sentences. The two main
kinds are known as coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions.

Determiner is a word that introduces a noun, such as a/an, the, every, this, those, or
many (as in a dog, the dog, this dog, those dogs, every dog, many dogs).

The determiner “the” is sometimes known as the definite article and the determiner a (or
an) as the indefinite article.

Exclamation (also called an interjection) is a word or phrase that expresses strong

emotion, such as surprise, pleasure, or anger. Exclamations often stand on their own, and in
writing they are usually followed by an exclamation mark rather than a full stop.
https://www.lexico.com/grammar/word-classes-or-parts-of-speech#noun

C. Morphemes

So we’ve seen that a word is a free form that has a meaning.  But you’ve probably
already noticed that there are other forms that have meaning and some of them seem to be
smaller than whole words. A morpheme is the smallest form that has meaning. Some
morphemes are free: they can appear in isolation. (This means that some words are also
morphemes.)  But some morphemes can only ever appear when they’re attached to something
else; these are called bound morphemes. Let’s go back to that simple sentence,

Penny cooked some carrots.

It’s quite straightforward to say that this sentence has four words in it. We can make the
observations we just discussed above to check for isolation, movability, and inseparability to
provide evidence that each of Penny, cooked, some, and carrots is a word. But there are more
than four units of meaning in the sentence.

Penny cook-ed some carrot-s.

The word cooked is made up of the word cook plus another small form that tells us that
the cooking happened in the past.  And the word carrots is made up of carrot plus a bit that tells
us that there’s more than one carrot.

That little bit that’s spelled –ed (and pronounced a few different ways depending on the
environment) has a consistent meaning in English: past tense.  We can easily think of several
other examples where that form has that meaning, like walked, baked, cleaned, kicked, kissed.
This –ed unit appears consistently in this form and consistently has this meaning, but it never
appears in isolation: it’s always attached at the end of a word. It’s a bound morpheme. For
example, if someone tells you, “I need you to walk the dog,” it’s not grammatical to answer “-ed”
to indicate that you already walked the dog.

Likewise, the bit that’s spelled –s  or –es (and pronounced a few different ways) has a
consistent meaning in many different words, like carrots, bananas, books, skates, cars, dishes,
and many others.  Like –ed, it is not free: it can’t appear in isolation.  It’s a bound
morpheme too.
If a word is made up of just one morpheme, like banana, swim, hungry, then we say that
it’s morphologically simple, or monomorphemic.
But many words have more than one morpheme in them: they’re morphologically
complex or polymorphemic. In English, polymorphemic words are usually made up of
a root plus one or more affixes. The root morpheme is the single morpheme that determines
the core meaning of the word. In most cases in English, the root is a morpheme that could be
free. The affixes are bound morphemes. English has affixes that attach to the end of a root;
these are called suffixes, like in books, teaching, happier, hopeful, singer. And English also
has affixes that attach to the beginning of a word, called prefixes, like
in unzip, reheat, disagree, impossible.
Some languages have bound morphemes that go into the middle of a word; these are
called infixes. Here are some examples from Tagalog (a language with about 24 million
speakers, most of them in the Philippines).
[takbuh [tumakbuh
run ran
] ]
wal walke
[lakad] [lumakad]
k d
bough
[bili] buy [bumili]
t
[kain] eat [kumain] ate

It might seem like the existence of infixes is a problem for our claim above that words
are inseparable. But languages that allow infixation do so in a systematic way — the infix can’t
be dropped just anywhere in the word. In Tagalog, the position of the infix depends on the
organization of the syllables in the word.
https://essentialsoflinguistics.pressbooks.com/chapter/6-2-words-and-morphemes/