Morphology

MORPHEMES
MORPHEME
– Is the minimal linguistic unit which has a meaning or
grammatical function.
– Word can be divided into a smaller units called
morpheme.
– E.g. one mrph: boy, book, love, desire
two mrph: boy + -ish desire + -able
book + -s love + -ed
three mrph: boy + -ish + -ness
desire + -able + -ity
Free & Bound Morpheme
– Free M. are those which can stand alone as a
word.
E.g. boy, desire, book, love.
– Bound M. are those which are always attached
to some other morpheme.
E.g. –ish, -able, -s, -ed, -ity, -ness
– Hospitalized hospital (n) + -ize
 hospitalize (v) + -ed
– The root/ base is hospital. The stems are
hospital, hospitalize
Affixes
– Prefix is an affix that is attached to the front of its
stem. E.g. im-, miss-, un-.
– Suffix is an affix that is attached to the end of its
stem. E.g.-ist, -ment, -tion.
– Infix is an affix that occurs within another
morpheme.
– Reduplication Affix is an affix that duplicates all
or part of the stem.
1. Partial reduplication
is a copy of the first consonant vowel.
E.g. tatakbuh, lalakad (Tagalok)
2. Full reduplication
is the repetition of the entire word
E.g. rumah-rumah (Indonesia)
 Inflectional Morpheme
– Inflectional Morpheme (IM) is morphemes that
change neither part of speech nor meaning and
give extra grammatical information about the
already existing meaning of word.

– The types of the Inflectional Suffixes in English:

-s (present), -ed (past), -ing (continous), -en
(past participle), -s (plural), -’s (possessive), -er
(comparative), -est (supperlative)
Derivational Morpheme
– Derivational Morpheme (DM) is morphemes that change either part
of speech and meaning. It usually uses affixes.

– E.g. Hospital (n) + -ize  hospitalize (v)

Govern (v) + -ment  government (n)

Nation (n) + -al  National (adj)

Inflectional vs. Derivational

– Occur at the margins of – Occur before Inflectional

words. Suffix/must be closer to
– Eg. –s (plural) always the root.
comes last a word, as in – Eg.
neighborhoods. neighbor + hood + s
root DM IM
Inflectional vs. Derivational

• Occur with all members • Occur with only some

of some large class of members of class of
morphemes. morphemes.
• Eg. Plural (-S) occurs • Eg. Suffix (-hood) with
with most nouns. brother, neighbor, knight.
• Have very few • But not with friend,
exception. daughter,etc.
• Although they are
NOUN.
Inflectional vs. Derivational

 Indicates syntactic – Indicate semantic

relations between relations within the
different word in a word.
sentence. – Eg. Painful
 Eg. She waits for me. – (-ful)has no particular
 (-s) shows agreement connection with any
with Subject of the verb other morpheme beyond
the word painful.
 How many morphemes
are these?
– Governments
– Miscalculation
– Boyishness
– Desirability
– Unlockable
– Contemplation
– Manliness
– Impersonal
– Reconstruction
– Unaffordable
Good luck