UNIT 1: WORD STRUCTURE

I. Lesson points:

• The word
• The morpheme
• Representation of Internal Structure of Words (Tree & Bracket diagram)

II. Content:
1. Introduction

Speakers of a language use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences. These rules
comprise the grammar of a language, which is learned when you acquire the language and includes the sound system (the
phonology), how words may be combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), ways in which sounds and meanings are
related (the semantics), and the words or lexicon. The range of constructions that is studied by grammar is very large, and
grammarians have often divided it into sub-fields. The oldest and most widely-used division is that between morphology and
syntax (Figure 1.1).
2. Morphology

As Figure 1 shows, morphology is a branch of grammar. The term comes from the Greek word morpheme, which means
“form.” Morphology is concerned with the structure of words; in other words, it is the field within linguistics that studies word
structure and word formation.
There are two basic types of words in human language - simple and complex. Simple words are those that cannot be broken
down into smaller meaningful units while complex words can be analyzed into smaller parts (constituents). The words “houses”,
for example, is made up of the form “house” and the plural marker -s, neither of which can be divided into smaller parts.
Morphology deals with the internal structure of complex words.

3.Morpheme

Words, like “houses”, are considered minimal free forms but are not the minimal meaningful unit of language because they can
often be broken down further. As we can see, “houses” consists of two meaningful parts: “house” and “-s”. These minimal
meaningful units are called morpheme in linguistics. While many English words consist of only one morpheme, others can
contain two, three, or more (see Table 1).

4. Types of morphemes

Lexical and Grammatical morphemes

The words of any language can be divided into broad types of categories, closed and open, of which the latter are most relevant
to morphology. The closed categories are the function words: pronouns like you, and she; conjunctions like and, if and
because; determiners like a and the; and a few others. Newly coined and borrowed words cannot be added to these categories.
However, new words can be created by adding morphemes to content words that belong to the open categories, which are also
known as major lexical categories, including: noun (N), verb (B), adjective (A), and adverb (Adv). Because the major problem of
morphology is how people make up and understand words that they have never encountered before, morphology is concerned
largely with lexical categories.
The simple function words and content words are also called function morpheme (i.e. grammatical morpheme) and content
morpheme (also lexical morpheme). In other words, a lexical morpheme names a concept/idea in our record of experience of the
world (e.g. house, car, tree, etc.). Grammatical morphemes do not really have a sense in and of themselves; instead, they express
some sort of relationship between lexical morphemes (e.g. a/the, and, but, etc.).

Free and Bound morphemes

A morpheme is considered free if it can constitute a word by itself, and a bound morpheme must be attached to another element.
The morpheme “house”, for example, is free since it can be used as a word on its own; the plural marker “-s”, on the other hand,
is bound.

Root and Affixes

Root morphemes are (usually free) morphemes around which words can be built up through the addition of more bound
morphemes. These bound morphemes, attached to a root, are called affixes.
Affixes have three types: prefixes are morphemes attached to the front of a root; suffixes to the end; infixes (not popular in
English) are inserted inside a root.
Inflectional and Derivation morphemes

Derivational morphemes are those that can be added to a word to create another word with new meaning and/ or new syntactic
category (new part of speech).
Inflectional morphemes do not change the meaning or syntactic category of a word. They can mark a word’s grammar category
such as tense, number, aspect and so on. Some examples are analyzed in Figure 1.2.

5. Internal Structure of Words

Like sentences, complex words such as houses and teachers have an internal structure. In this section, we will consider the
categories and representation that are relevant to the analysis of word structure.
Let’s look in some detail at the word denationalization. This word contains five morphemes: de-, nation, -al, -ize, -ation. Nation
is a free morpheme, since it can stand alone as a word, while the rest are bound morphemes. But simply listing the parts of the
word and whether they are free or bound does not tell us the structure of this word (how the parts are organized to form the
word). The parts have to be put together in a particular way, with a particular arrangement and order. For example, none of these
possible orders of the same five morphemes constitutes an English word:
* ationizalnationde
* alizdeationnation
* nationdeizational
In fact, of the 120 possible arrangements of these five morphemes, only one, denationalization, could be an English word. The
order is so strict because each of the bound morphemes is an affix, a morpheme which not only must be bound, but must be
bound in a particular position. Furthermore, each affix attaches only to certain particular lexical category (either N or V or A),
and results in a word of another particular lexical category. The negative affix -de, for example, attaches to verbs and forms
other verbs:
ionize - deionzie
segregate - desegregate
Similarly, the affix -al forms adjectives from nouns, -ize forms verbs from adjectives or noun, and -ation forms nouns from
verbs.
Given these restrictions, the structure of the word denationalization can best be seen as the result of beginning with the simple
form nation, which we call the root of the word, and adding affixes successively, one at a time, as follows:
nation
national
nationalize
denationalize
denationalization
The structure of the entire word may be represented by means of either a set of labeled brackets or a tree diagram. Both are
shown in Figure 1.3 the diagram reveals how the word begins at its root and is built up one affix at a time. The abbreviation Af
stands for affix.
[[de[[[nation]N al]A ize]V]V ation]N
Exercise:
Task 1. Consider the following words and answer the questions below.

inputs - Persian- within- another - realized

unreliable - sweeteners- easiest - unhappiness - independently

Group the morphemes of these words into free morphemes and bound morphemes and state whether the bound morphemes are
derivational or inflectional affixes. Some examples have been done for you.
Word Free Bound morpheme
morpheme Derivational Inflectional
affix affix
Example: Lone ly; ness
loneliness
Example: WhiteWhite ,
House house

Answer Key
Task 2. Draw Bracket diagram and Tree diagram and for the following words:

shipper - disobey - simply - anticlimaxes

digitizes - activity- resettled - disengagement

Answer Key

Review

BÀI TẬP

CÁC BÀI KHÁC

Course Syllabus AG 2018

Unit 2: Word formation processes I
Unit 3: Word formation processes II
Unit 4: Practice / Review quizzes
Unit 5: Phrases I
Unit 6: Phrases II
Unit 7: Sentence elements I
Unit 8: Sentence elements II
Unit 9: Clause patterns
Unit 10: Classification of sentences
Unit 11: Subordinate clauses
Unit 12: Practice / Review quizzes
Unit 13: Syntax and its aspects
Unit 14: Structural Ambiguity
Unit 15: Sentence Synthesis