Morphology and Words Formation Process.

Assignment Submitted to:

Dr Tahira Asghar.
Assignment Submitted by:
 Muhammad Arslan.
 Nazia Siddique.
M.Phil. English Linguistics 1st (Sec C)
Department of English Linguistics
IUB Bahawalpur.
Morphology:
Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies
word structure, especially in terms of morphemes. It’s the study of
word formation (as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in
language.

Morphemes:
A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a
language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a
language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called
morphology.

Types of Morphemes.
There are two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can
occur alone and bound morphemes must occur with another
morpheme. An example of a free morpheme is "bad", and an
example of a bound morpheme is "ly." It is bound because although
it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be attached to another
morpheme to produce a word.

Free morpheme: bad

Bound morpheme: -ly
Word: badly.

You can easily understand the difference between

free and bound Morphemes by the help of this
table.
Undress carelessn
ed
ess

Un- dress -ed care -less -ness

prefix stem suffix stem Suffix suffix

(boun (free) (boun (free (bound) (boun

d) d) ) d)

Types of Free Morphemes:

 Lexical and Functional Morphemes:
Lexical morphemes are
called open class words and include nouns, verbs, adjectives
and adverbs. New words can regularly be added to this
group. And some examples are girl, man, house, tiger, sad,
long, yellow, sincere, open, look, follow, and break.
Functional morphemes, or closed class words, are
conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns; and new
words cannot be (or are very rarely) added to this class.
Examples are and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in,
the, that, it, them.
Types of Bond Morphemes:
 Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes.
There are two categories of
affixes: derivational and inflectional. The main difference between
the two is that derivational affixes are added to morphemes to form
new words that may or may not be the same part of speech and
inflectional affixes are added to the end of an existing word for
purely grammatical reasons. In English there are only eight total
inflectional affixes:
Noun + -s’ –s
Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en
Adjective+ -er, -est

-s 3rd person singular present she waits

-ed past tense he walked

-ing Progressive she's watching

-en past participle she has eaten

-s Plural three tables

-'s Possessive Holly's cat

-er Comparative you are taller

-est Superlative you are the talles

Morphological Description:
Inflectional morpheme
never change the grammatical category of a word.
Old (Adjective) Older (Adjective)
While derivational morpheme can change the grammatical
category of a word.
Teach (Verb) Teacher (Noun)
You can clarify by the help of following table.
The girl -s’ Wild -ness shock
functional lexical inflectiona lexical derivational lexical
l
-ed the teach -er -s
inflectional Functional lexical Derivational Inflectional

Problem in Morphological Description:

So far we have only
considered examples of English words in which the different
morphemes are easily identifiable. Thus what is the
inflectional morpheme that makes sheep the plural of sheep,
or men the plural of man? And if –al is the derivational suffix
added to the stem institutional, then can we take –al off the
word legal to get the stem leg? Unfortunately, the answer is
“NO”.
Morphs and allomorphs:
Morphs are the actual forms
used to realize morphemes. E.g. cat consist of two morphs
Cat +‘s
One of a closely related set of morphs describe them as
allomorphs of that morphemes. It is a linguistic term for a
variant form of a morpheme, the concept occurs when a unit
of meaning can vary in sound. (Phonologically) without
changing meaning. It is used in linguistics to explain the
comprehension of variations in sound for a specific
morpheme.
Allomorphs in English:
English has several morphemes
that vary in sound but not in meaning. E.g. (include the past
tense and the plural morpheme). In the English language the
past tense morpheme is –ed. It occurs in several allomorphs
depending on its Phonological environment, assimilating
voicing of the previous segment or inserting a schwa when
following an alveolar stop.
As /ed/ in ‘hunted’ or ‘banded’
As /d/ in ‘buzzed’
As /t/ in ‘fished’

Word formation Process:

Definition:
Word Formation Process (also called Morphological Process) is a means by
which new words are produced either by modification of existing words or by
complete innovation, which in turn become a part of the language.
 Types of Word Formation Processes
Different types of word formation processes are employed to create new
words. However, all word formation processes basically bring either
inflectional or derivational changes. Inflection differs from derivation to the
following extent:

Inflection Derivation
Produces grammatical variants of the Produces a new word on the
same word. basis of an existing word.
Modifies a word to express different Changes the word class (also
grammatical categories such as tense, called parts of speech; form
mood, voice, aspect, person, number, class; lexical class; syntactic
gender and case. category).
Does not change the meaning of a word. Modifies the meaning of the
For example: determine→ determines, root. For example: modern →
determining, determined. modernize (to make modern).
1. Clipping:
As the name suggests, clipping is the word formation process in which a word
is reduced to a shorter form. With a sharp contrast to back-formation, clipping
keeps the original word meaning intact. These words are very common in
everyday speech. For instance: lab is the clipped form of laboratory. . There
are four types of clippings:

 Back clipping: it involves the truncation of end of a word as

in ad from advertisement.
 Fore-clipping: it is the removal of the beginning of a word as
in phone from telephone.
 Middle clipping: it is the extraction of the beginning and end of a word as
in flu from influenza.
 Complex clipping: is removing multiple parts from multiple words as
in cablegram from cabletelegram.

2. Compounding

Also called composition, by this process two or more than two words are
combined together to create a single word, having a single idea and function.
Compound words are spelt as a single word, or as two or more hyphenated
words, and even as two or more separate words. For example:

 life + style → lifestyle

 mother + in + law → mother-in-law
 shopping + mall → shopping mall

3. Borrowing

Borrowing is one of the most common sources of getting new words in

English. This refers to the words adopted from other languages. Throughout
history the English language has adopted a vast number of loan words from
other languages.

For example:

• Alcohol (Arabic)
• Boss (Dutch)
• Piano (Italian)
• Robot (Czech)
• Zebra (Bantu)

4. Coinage

Also called invention, is a morphological process by which new words are

invented. Coinage is a word formation process in which new words are
created either deliberately or accidentally.

Examples:

 Heroin
 Hotspot
 Smartphone
 Google

5. Blending:

Blending is a morphological process in which the parts of two or more words

are combined together to form a new word. Usually, the parts consist of the
beginning of one word and the end of the other word.

 Example
 Smoke +fog = Smog
 Breakfast + lunch → brunch
 6. Acronyms:
These words are formed with the initial letters of a set of other words.
Examples:
Compact Disk – CD
Video Cassette Recorder – VCR
Personal Identification Number –PIN
7. Backformation:

Backformation is a very specialized type of reduction process. Typically a word

of one type, usually noun, is reduced to form another word of a different type,
usually verb. A good example of backformation is the process whereby the
noun television first came into ude and then the term televise is created form
it.
More examples:
 Donation – Donate
 Option – Opt
 Emotion – Emote
 Enthusiasm – Enthuse
 Babysit – Babysitter
8. Conversion:
Conversion is a change in the function of a word, as for
example, when a noun comes to be used as a verb without any
reduction. Other labels of this very common process are “category
change” and “functional shift”. A number of nouns such as paper, butter,
bottle, vacation and so on, can via the process of conversion come to be
used as verbs as in the following examples:

 My brother is papering my bedroom.

 Did you buttered this toast?
 We bottled the home brew last night.

9. Derivation:
Derivation is the most common word formation process and
it accomplished by means of a large number of small bits of the English
language which are not usually given separate listings in dictionaries.
These small bits are called affixes. Examples:

 Unhappy
 Misrepresent
 Prejudge
 Joyful
 Careless
 Happiness

10. Prefixes and Suffixes:

In the preceding group of words, it should be
obvious that some affixes have to be added to the beginning of a
word. These are called prefixes: unreliable. The other affix forms are
called suffixes and are added at the end of the word: foolishness.

11. Infixes:
One of the characteristics of English words is that
any modifications to them occur at the beginning or the end; mix can
have something added at the beginning re-mix or at the
end, mixes, mixer, but never in the middle, called infixes.