11 Basic Concepts in Morphology

Ms. Srirupa Poddar

Learning Outcome:

This module deals with the basic concepts in morphology.  The primary intension of this  module  is to enable the students to develop an insight into the word structure and word formation. The module is both theoretical and practical in nature. It is theoretical as it provides the students with considerable knowledge of morphological terms and processes. It is practical as it helps the students to develop their skills in morphological analyses. The essential reading and the additional reading list will help the students to have an in-depth understanding of the topic. The multiple choice questions and other exercise questions will help them to assess their knowledge and better understanding of the module.

Introduction: Basic concepts in morphology.

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that deals with words their internal structure and how they are formed. The German poet, novelist, playwright and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) coined the term morphology in the nineteenth century in a biological context.  This word is of Greek origin. The term ‘morph’ means shape or form and morphology means the study of forms.

Thus Morphology attempts to explain and account for the following:

• How words are created in a particular language
• What is the appropriate form of a word given its location in a particular sentence
• What governs the use of the correct form in a particular sentence

Why Morphology is necessary?

• To get an accurate description of individual languages in a detailed manner as much as possible.
• We can search for patterns in human languages at the word level.
• Theorize and conceptualize how morphemes can be organized.
• We can understand the processes involved in word formation.
• Other than Linguistics morphological knowledge can be used in other fields like language documentation, anthropology, and second language acquisition teachers: ESL, cognitive scientists, language art teachers, writers.

Morpheme:

Morphemes are the smallest indivisible unit of meaningful content and grammatica l function. A morpheme is not identical to a word. A morpheme may or may not stand alone whereas a word can stand alone. Morpheme can be defined as a word or part of a word that has a semantic content and that contains no smaller part with a semantic content. For example, the word unforgivable has 3 morphemes {un}is a prefix meaning “not” + {forgive} is the root morpheme + {able} is an adjective forming suffix. Every word will comprise of one or more morphemes. For example the word dog has one morpheme and when we add a plural marker -s to the word dog it becomes dogs with two morphemes where the suffix -s plays a grammatical function.

Classification of Morphemes:

Morphemes can be classifies into two types:

Free morpheme and bound morpheme.

(i) Free morphe me: Free morphemes are the words that can stand alone and work independently like for example: cat, dog, car, tree.

(ii) Bound morpheme: Bound morphemes are those which cannot stand alone and work independently. It occurs only in combination with other morphemes or root.  For example: -un, -s, -er, -ing, -tion, – ly.

Classification of bound morpheme:

Affixes: Affixes are always bound morphemes that are attached to a word. Affixes in a word are assigned for the grammatical function. Affixes are added to a word or root of a word to change the meaning. Affixes can be further classified onto various types based on the position they occur in a word.

Prefix: It is the letter or group of letters that is always placed at the beginning of a word. It precedes the base.

For example: un-necessary, illogical, re-start, ir-regular.

Suffix: It follows the base. Suffixes are placed at the end of a word. For example: cleanli- ness, regular- ly, play- ing, play-er.

Circumfix: They occur on both sides of the base. One part appears before the base and the other part appears after the base. For example: un- mind- ful, in the Malay root word -adil ”fair” both the prefix ”ke” and suffix ”an” can be added to form the circumfix ke-adil-an ”fairness”.

Infix: It is placed within the base itself.

For example: d-um-ater which means wiser is an example from the Tagalog language. Further classifications of affixes are: Derivational morphemes, and Inflectional morphemes.

Derivational morpheme : Derivational morphemes are those which change the part of speech or meaning when combined with a root. Generally the affixes used with the root word are bound morphemes.

For example: Verb to Noun: sing – singer

Noun to adjective: length – long

Adjective to Adverb: happy – happily

Adjective to Verb: creative – create

 Inflectional morpheme : Inflectional morphemes are those morphemes that do not change part of speech or meaning. It indicates the syntactic or semantic relation between different words in a sentence.

For example: wait to wait-ed, dog to dog-s, play to play-ing.

Portmanteau morpheme: Portmanteau morphemes are those morphemes which contain more than one meaning but cannot be further broken into separate morphemes.

E.g. she (3rd person+singular+feminine+subject)

Empty morphemes: Empty morphemes are those morphemes that have structure or form but have no semantic content.

For example: cran in the word cran-berry, berry has meaning of its own but cran doesn’t have any semantic content.

Zero morphemes: Zero morphemes are those morphemes that are physically not present in  the word, yet fulfil the grammatical requirement of the language. In the zero morphemes the null morpheme is added to the root, therefore it has a  function but no  form.  For example: the  verb put has same form in both past and present. Similarly the word cut has same form in both past and present. In the word sheep, the plural form is also sheep. The word sheep gets attached to a null  plural morpheme, which changes the meaning but doesn’t change the form.

Clitics: Clitics are morphemes that have phonological dependency on a neighbouring word but whose syntax is word like. They are syntactically independent but phonologically dependent and always bound on some other form. Clitics often have grammatical rather than lexical meaning. They belong to closed classes like pronouns, prepositions, determiners and conjunctions. They are usually appearing at the edge of a word, outside derivational and inflectional affixes. For example: the contraction of the morpheme is, as in ‘what’s happening?’ or the contracted forms of the auxiliary verbs in I’m and we’ve are Clitics. Clitics can be of two types: proclitics and enclitics. Proclitics occur at the beginning of the morpheme that is before the host and enclitics occur at the end of a morpheme that is after its host.

Word: A word is the minimal free unit. A word may consist of a single morpheme as in red, white, boy, run or more than one as in redness, boys, running, quickly, Word can be used in different senses: as a physical unit and as a semantic entity. The physical entities, the written or spoken forms of a word are called word forms. In other words, word forms are the physical  realization  of lexemes. For example: ‘talk’, ‘talked’, ‘ta lking’ are different word forms of the word ‘talk’. Words can be combined together to form phrases, clauses and sentences. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols are called graphemes.

Lexeme: Lexeme is a term used to refer to the idea that inflected forms which are also words themselves are still variants of a single word. It is the basic unit of meaning. The headwords or the vocabulary that are given in a dictionary are the lexemes. It includes all the inflected forms of a word.

For example: Play- ‘plays’, ‘playing’, ‘player’, ‘play’

Morph: A morph is the physical form representation of some morpheme in a language. It is the recurrent distinctive sound (phoneme) or sequence of sounds (phonemes). For example: the word infamous is made up of three morphs – in- fam-eous which represents one single morpheme. Langendoen defines it ”as a specific pronunciation associated with a specific meaning such that the pronunciation cannot be broken down into meaningful parts whose meanings combine to form the meaning of the whole.”

For example: the word ‘no’, there is no distinction between the morpheme and the morph as there is only one meaning associated with the pronunciation.

Discontinuous morpheme: Discontinuous morphemes are those morphemes that are interrupted by the insertion of another morphological unit. For example: Circumfixes.

Allomorph: They are the group of morphs that are the realization of the same morpheme. Just as an allophone is the variation of a single phoneme, an allomorph is a variety of a single morpheme.

For example: the English noun plural morpheme has the following allomorphs: -z as in dogs, -s as in cats, -Iz as in buses.

Suppletion: In suppletion the allomorphs of a morphe me are phonologically unrelated. For example: go-went, is-was, bad-worse-worst, one-first, good/better.

Root: A root is the basic lexical unit of a word, which contains the most significant aspects of semantic content. A root cannot be further reduced into smaller parts. Roots are the lexical morphemes and the base to which grammatical derivational morphemes are added to form a complex word. A root is that part of a word that is remaining after all the affixes are removed. It is the basic part that is remaining in a lexeme.

For example: in the word ‘untouchables’ the root is ‘touch’ , the suffix -able, prefix -un and another suffix -s are added to the root . ‘Play’ is the root form of ‘plays’, ‘playing’, ‘played’, ‘player.’ Some lexemes have more than one root. A root can also be a stem. As it is said “All roots can be base but not all bases are roots.”

Stem: Stem is a part of word that occurs before any inflectional affix. It is related to only inflection.

For example: ‘touch’ is the stem in the word ‘to uched.’ Bases can be called stems in inflectional morphology.

Base: A base is any form of a word to which affixes of any kind can be added. It yields a more complex form of a word. The affixes attached to a base can be inflectional affixes selected for syntactic reasons or derivational affixes which alter the meaning or the grammatical category of the base.

For example: a root like ‘girl’ can be a base since it can be attached to various other affixes  like ‘ -s’ as in girls ‘- ish’ as in girlish.

Nida’s principles for the identification of morphemes

(i) Nida’s Principle 1: Forms, which have a common semantic distinctiveness and an identical phonemic form in all their occurrences constitute a single

Example: ‘-er’ in singer, player, writer, teacher.

(ii) Nida’s Principle 2: Forms, which have common semantic distinctiveness, but which differ in phonetic form may constitute a morpheme provided the distribution of formal differences is phonologically

For example: – z as in dogs, -s as in cats, -Iz as in buses respectively constitute a morpheme but their occurrences are phonologically conditioned.

(iii) Nida’s Principle 3: Forms which have a common semantic distinctiveness, but which differ in phonetic form in such a way that their distribution cannot be phonologically defined constitute a single morpheme, if the forms are in a complementary

(iv) Nida’s Principle 4: An overt formal difference in a structural series constitutes a morpheme, if in any number of such series the overt formal difference and a zero structural difference are the only significant features for distinguishing a minimal unit of phonetic semantic

For example: both ‘books’ and ‘deer’ are plurals, but one has the plural marker ‘-s’ and the other has a null morpheme ‘Ø’ as the plural marker. According to Nida’s 4th principle the plural marker ‘-s’ and the other plural marker ‘Ø’ constitute the same morpheme.

(v) Nida’s Principle 5: Homophonous forms are identifiable as the same or different morphemes based on the following conditions:

• Homophonous forms with distinctively different meanings constitute different morphemes. For example: pair, pare and pear constitute different morphemes.
• Homophonous forms with related meanings constitute a single morpheme if the meaning classes are paralleled by distributional differences. For example: ‘run’ in the expression ‘they run’ and ‘their run.’

(vi) Nida’s Principle 6: A morpheme is isolable if it occurs under the following conditions:

• In isolation
• In multiple combinations, in atleast one of which the unit with which it is combined occurs in isolation or in other combination.
• In a single combination, provided the element with which it is combined occur in  isolation or in other combinations with non-unique constituents. For example: Morphemes like ‘cran’, ‘rasp’ etc. which occurs only in single combinations like cranberry, raspberry.

Morphophonemic processes:

Assimilation: Assimilation is the process in which one sound becomes more similar to another neighbouring sound under the influence of that neighbouring sound. The changes are classified as total-partial assimilation, progressive-regressive and contact-distant.

Total Assimilation- If a sound becomes completely identical to another by taking all the phonetic features that change is a total assimilation. For example: Latin septem ‘seven’ > Italian sette.

Partial Assimilation- Partial assimilation occurs when the assimilating sound acquires some of the features and doesn’t become identical. For examp le: Old English efn ‘even’ > West-Saxon emn.

Progressive Assimilation- Forward spread of the feature in assimilation is known as progressive assimilation. A sound becomes more like the preceding sound. In progressive assimilation which is also known as perseverative assimilation the source of assimilation is the first sound in the sequence. For example: The English plural is either /z/ or /s/ when it occurs after a non-sibilant sound.    The    voicing    feature    is    taken     from     the     final     consonant     of    the     base. For example: “tape” pronounced as “tate”

Regressive Assimilation- Backward spread of feature in assimilation is termed as regressive assimilation. A sound becomes more like a following sound. In regressive assimilation also known as anticipatory assimilation the source of the assimilation is the second sound in the sequence.

For example: “tape” pronounced as “pape”

in + logical → illogical

Contact Assimilation- If the sound undergoing change and conditioning sound are immediately adjacent to each other then it is called contact assimilation. For example: the English word sixth [sIksT] [s] becomes dental under the influence of the adjoining [T].

E.g., in + possible → impossible

Distant Assimilation- If the sounds undergoing the changes are not adjacent to each other, it is called distant assimilation. E.g., penkʷe → kʷinkʷe

Reciprocal assimilation- If there is a mutual influence between the two phonemes it is known as reciprocal assimilation. When such a change results in a single segment with some features of both components, it is known as coalescence or fusion.

Dissimilation- If the sounds undergoing the changes become less similar to each other it is known as dissimilation. This can apply to sounds that were originally identical, or sounds that we re originally similar. In general, dissimilation refers to a process of two things becoming increasingly dissimilar. One popular example for describing this process is where various words in English, such as ‘marble’, take on an ‘l’ sound, where for instance, the original French word was ‘marbre’.

Gemination- It refers to the change which produces a sequence of two identical consonants from a single starting consonant. For example: osaa “he/she knows” becomes ossaa “he/she knows” (Finish).

De-Gemination- when a sequence of two identical consonants is reduced to a single occurrence. As in ‘immature’ the double /m/ in the spelling is pronounced as a single /m/.

Lengthening – It refers to the change in which some sounds usually vowels are lengthened in some context. For example: balk ‘brother- in- law’ becomes ba:lk ‘brother- in- law’ (Q’eqchi)

Shortening- It refers to the change in which some sounds usually vowels are shortened in some context.

Ablaut/Apophony- It refers to the alteration of sounds within a word that indicates grammatical information. For example: drink, drank, drunk.

Word Formation processes:

Compounding: It is the process of word formation that involves the combination of two complete already existing word forms into a single compound. The category of the entire compound is determined by its head. Endocentric and exocentric are the terms used to describe semantically headed and semantically non- headed compounds respectively.

Endocentric compounds : If AB is a compound of A and B, in endocentric compounds, AB is an instance of B. In this type of compounds the final element serves as the head of the compound and the reaming elements provide additional information. The head determines the basic syntactic or semantic category of the compound. The non-head stem, in endocentric compounds specifies a sub- category of the referents denoted be the head of the compound. For example: Chess table (a types of table), sky blue (a shade of blue).

Exocentric compounds: In this type of compounds AB is neither A nor B but a C somehow that is associated with A and B. Exocentric compounds do not have an overt semantic head. For example: Pickpocket (It is not related to pocket in any sense but it is a thief who steals from others pocket).

Copulative Compounds: In this type of compounds AB is A and B. Both A and B share the same status. They are written with a hyphen. Copulative compounds are also known as coordinative (dvandva) compounds. For example: producer-director.

Clipping: It is the word formation process which refers to the reduction of a word to one of its  parts. For example: gas (gasoline). Clipping can be of four types.

Back clipping/Apocopation: here the initial part of the word is retained and the final part of the word is deleted. For example: exam (examination).

Fore clipping: It refers to the phenomenon in which the initial part of the word is deleted and the final part is retained. For example: phone (telephone).

Middle clipping: here the middle part of the word is retained. For example: flu (influenza).

Complex clipping: here one part of the original compound remains intact. For example: cablegram (cable telegram).

Blending: It is a word formation process in which a new word is formed by combining parts of two other words where the meaning of the new word is a combination of the meaning of the two words. For example: ‘smog’ derived from ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’ and contains meaning of both the words,’brunch’ (breakfast+ lunch), ‘motel’ (motor+ hotel), ‘newscast’ (news+ broadcast).

Backformation: It is a process in which new words are formed by the removal of what looks like a typical affix in the language. For example: edit from editor, donate-donation, babysitter-babysit.

Coining: It is the invention of new words. For example: Xerox, Nylon.

Acronyms : These are the words created from the initial letters of several words or word parts in a phrase or name. The pronunciation of the words differs  from the  full forms for which they stand. For example: radar, UNO, TOEFL, NASA, AIDS.

Borrowing: It is the process in which new words are taken from some other language. The terms that are borrowed is known as loan words. For example: ‘piano’ is a borrowed term from Italian language.

Derivation: It is the process of forming new words from already existing ones by the addition of affixes. The derived word may not be in the same category of the root and it will be semantically distinct from the root. For example: establishment from establish.

Conversion: It is the process of word formation in which a new word is created from an already existing word without any change in the form. The category of the word is changed keeping the  form same. For example: the adjective clean is converted to the verb clean, (verb) to hit – (noun) a hit, (noun) a sign – (verb) to sign.

Incorporation: It is the phenomenon in which a word usually a verb or preposition is compounded with another element typically a noun, pronoun or adverb.

For example: babysit.

Eponyms : A person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named for example: Cook Islands (James Cook).

Reduplication: It is the process of formation of new words either by doubling the entire word or only a part of the word. Full reduplication happens when the exact repetition of a sound or word takes place whereas partial reduplication involves constant ablaut or vowel alteration. For example: gin ‘ourselves’ – gingin ‘we to us’, so-so, bye-bye, hotch-potch, zig- zag.

Lexical Morphology: The lexical Morphology and Phonology model was introduced by Paul Kiparsky and K.P Mohanan. It involves the treatment of language with a symbiotic relationship between morphological and phonological rules. The central principle of lexical morphology is that the morphological component of the grammar is organized in a series of hierarchical strata. The English affixes are classified into two broad classes on the basis of their phonological behaviour. Affixes that do not result in any phonological variation on the base to which they are attached are called neutral affix. For example: – less, -ness. The affixes that cause an effect on the segmental and supra-segmental structure of the base to which they are attached are called the non-neutral affix. For example: -ec, -ee. The basic principle of lexical morphological model is the level-ordering hypothesis. It is assumed that the affixes are added to the base at different strata or levels and each stratum has associated with it a set of morphological rules that do the word building.

Auxilation: It is the process of development of lexical items into auxiliaries.

Summary:

This module introduces several concepts that are basic to morphology. The different notions  of  word: the lexeme (‘abstract, dictionary word’), the word-form (‘concrete word’) and the various word formation processes. It discusses about the various morphophonemic processes that take place when a morpheme is attached to a word and  it alters the phonetic environment of other  morphemes in that. Inflectional morphology describes the relationship between the word- forms in a lexeme’s paradigm, and derivational morphology describes the relation between  lexemes.  Complex words can often be segmented into morphemes, which are called affixes when they are short and affixes can be further divided based on their position in a word. They have an abstract meaning, and cannot stand alone, and roots when they are longer and have a more concrete meaning. When two or more morphemes express the same meaning and occur in complementary distribution, they are often considered allomorphs.

Reference

1. Aronoff, Mark & K irsten Fudeman. 2005. What is Morphology? Blackwell publishing Ltd.
2. Bauer, Laurie, 2004. Introducing Linguistic morphology (2nd Ed.), Washington,D.C: Georgetown University Press.
3. Haspelmath, Martin & Sims, Adrea D. 2010. Understanding Morphology. (2nd ED.), London: Hodder Education.
4. Katamba, Francis. (1993). Morphology. Modern Linguistics series. New York: SM Press.
5. Matthews, Peter. 1991. Morphology. (2nd ED.) Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.
6. Nida, Eugene, A. 1949. Morphology: A Descriptive Analysis of Words. (2nd ED.), Ann Arbor: UMP.
7. Spencer. Andrew.1991. Morphological Theory: An Introduction to word structure in a Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.