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Academic Year :2014/2015

Department :English Language and Literature
Filire
:Master Culture and Linguistics
Semester
: 1, MODULE 3
Course
: MORPHOLOGY

MOR
PHOL
OGY
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Faculty Of Letters

E
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MORPHOLOGY
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A
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An Introduction

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utterance , proposition, and

sentence
1. You are intelligent.

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Morphology: Introduction

Prof. AFKINICH

a complete thought;
Physical,
can be heard,
recorded,
fed into a computer, etc.,

. Utterance:

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utterance , proposition, and

sentence

Different utterances = different

propositions;
A proposition :

that aspect of the meaning of a

sentence which allows us to say,
"Yes, that's true" or 'No, that's
false".

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Morphology: Introduction

Prof. AFKINICH

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utterance , proposition, and

sentence
A sentence :
an abstraction over utterances which have the
same form;
Part of our shared knowledge of language;
allows us to construct sentences, which we can then
utter
are internal, mental entities, which have an abstract
form.
imagine (1) uttered by more than three people: its
the same sentence;

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Prof. AFKINICH

Morphology: Introduction

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utterance , proposition, and

sentence

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Morphology: Introduction

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2) Tu es intelligent (French)
3) nta mttawar (MA)

(2) and (3) below form the same

proposition with (1)

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utterance , proposition, and

Asentence
proposition:

a state of affairs that holds in the world,

and
The correspondence of the world with
that state of affairs allows us to attribute
truth or falsity to the proposition.

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Morphology: Introduction

Prof. AFKINICH

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Dictionary Definition

Morphology: a study of the structure

or form of something Merriam-Webster
Unabridged
mor phol o gy (mrflj-mNK) n. pl. mor.phol.o.gies. Abbr. morph.,
morphol.1.Biology 2. Linguistics. The
study of the structure and form of words
in language or a language, including
inflection, derivation, and the formation
of compounds. American Heritage
Dictionary

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Morphology: Introduction

Prof. AFKINICH

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MORPHOLOGY

Bloomfield's definition of morphology from the

opening sentences of his classic chapter on
Morphology: "By the morphology of a
language we mean the constructions in which
bound forms appear among the constituents.
By definition, the resultant forms are either
bound forms or words, but never phrases.
Accordingly, we may say that morphology
includes the constructions of words and parts
of words, while syntax includes the
construction of phrases" (1933: 207).

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Morphology: Introduction

Prof. AFKINICH

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Morphology is the study of morphemes

and their arrangements in forming words.
Morphemes are the minimal meaningful
units which may constitute words or parts
of words, (Nida (1949:1))

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Morphology: Introduction

Prof. AFKINICH

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MORPHOLOGY

Morphology is the study of word

formation, including the ways new words
are coined in the languages of the world, and
the way forms of words are varied depending
on how theyre used in sentences. (Lieber
(2009:2))
In linguistics morphology refers to the mental
system involved in word formation or to the
branch of linguistics that deals with words,
their internal structure, and how they are
formed.(Aronoff (2011:2))

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Morphology: Introduction

Prof. AFKINICH

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Morphology

As a science interested in the study of part of

language, morphoogy flourished in the 19 th century.
It was a science that was mainly interested in the
study of the change(s) occuring in the form of words
By the mid 20th century, it was widely believed that
everything morphology has been uncovered,
Discoveries of that time were not of the kind that
would make cross-linguistic generalizations about
the morphology of languages,
It was simply observed that languages diffred in a
kind of random way.

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Morphology: Introduction

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Morphology

The interest shifted to syntax (a new filed of

study, then). It was thought to be the field that
would be bringing new isigyts into the nature of
language and knowledge of language,
Towards the end of the last century, advances in
syntax established the fact that there are still
questions to be answered in Morphology,
This has led to a resurgence of morphology,
Since the end of 1970s, the study of morphology
has flourished in ways that could not be
imagined at the beginning of 20 th century.

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Morphology: Introduction

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Morphology

This flourishing is claimed (Bauer (2003: 5)) to

be partly due to the following 5 reasons:
1. Consideration of new data from a range of
languages,
2. A consideration of the patterning of morphological
data across languages,
3. Innovations in the treatment of syntax and
phonology(which have held implications for
morphology)
4. A renewed interest in how the brain processes
words,
5. The detailed study of morphological systems
themselves

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Exercise

Consider these sentences:

How many
different
meanings of
grammar are
there in these
sentences and
what is the
precise meaning
of grammar in
each sentence?

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1. I bought a grammar of
Arabic.
2. The grammar of Arabic
allows the Object-Verbsubject ordering
3. He tried to learn Arabic but
the Grammar was too hard
for him.
4. The grammar of a language
includes its phonology, its
morphology, and its syntax.
5. I always loved grammar
lessons at school.

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WORDS

One way to answer the question:

1. What does language consist of?

2. The fire is burning.

Is to say : words.
In a sentence such as (2):

We say that we have 4 words. But then if

anyone asks us: How do we know? The
answer is quite difficult

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Morphology: Introduction

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WORDS

Here are three criteria that we might have thought

of:
1. words are those things which occur between spaces,
(1)works only for written languages. It doesn't work for
spoken ones;
Even in English: a Black bird. 3? or 2? Ice cream ?
2. Meaning, one word is one concept. Black bird (a kind
of bird)
Problem: what does it mean to say one concept?
3. It is about pronunciation we cannot just really interrupt
the word black bird. we pronounce it together as one
word. That's what we call prosody, the way in which we
pronounce words and sentences together.

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WORDS

It seems that we have got three criteria

which are quite unreliable,
linguists are still quarreling about what is
the right definition of a word,
Conclusion: words are hard to define
and at the same time we know a word
whenever we see one or hear one

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WORDS

At this point, we might also talk about the different

distinction that can obtain whne we look into the
details of words. Consider:
1. As a teacher I would do as teachers would expect a
teacher to do when teaching.
How many words? 16? Orthographic words, (space,
meaning, prosody)
12? Word forms, realizations of
lexemes
10? Lexemes, abstract dictionary
words. Most of the time signalled by use of small
capitals to rite them.

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 Grammatical words:
1. Yesterday, I walked home.
2. I have walked home.

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words

. We clearly KNOW that the two walked above are

not the same.
. In (1), it is WALK+ past;
. In (2), it is WALK+ past participle
. Grammatical words are defined in terms of their
place in the paradigm and named by descriptions
(such as above) which speel out that place

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WORDS

We have now 3 kinds of words

i. Word forms including orthographic
words,
ii. Lexemes,
iii. Grammatical words

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WORDS

MORPH:

A unit which is a segment of a word-form:

Potentially free morphs: right above

Obligatorily bound morphs

E.g. birthright = birth.right

Completely = complete. ly

It is typically the case in English that all

free morphs realise LEXEMES

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Any morph which can realise a lexeme and which is

not any further analysable (except in the form of
phonemes) is called a root
Obligatory bound morphs which do not realise a
lexeme and which are attached to roots to produce
word forms are called affixes,
Affixes can be added directly to a root or
they can be added to a root and some
already attached affixe(s),
A base is anything to which we attach an affix
whether it is a root or something bigger than a root

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WORD

When an affix is attached before a base it

is called a prefix,
after the base, it is called a suffix,
If it is attached in the middle of the base,
it is an infix,
Suffixes are more common in English
than prefixes are,
There are no infixes in English

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WORDS

Affixes can be of two kinds:

Inflectional, or
Derivational

An inflectional affix is one which forms a new

word form of a lexeme from a base,
A derivational affix is one which forms a new
lexeme from a base.

Recreates = re+create = a new lexeme, and

recreate +s = a new word form
In English, prefixes are always derivational and
suffixes are either derivational or inflectional

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WORDS

Criteria to say if an affix is derivational or

inflectional:

1. If it changes the part of speech of the base,

it is derivational,
2. Inflectional affixes have always a regular
meaning, that of derivational ones is
irregular,
3. If you can add an inflection to one member
of a class, you can add it to all members of
that class (3rd person vs tion :
nationalis(e).ation *com(e).ation,
*produc(e).tion
Prof. AFKINICH
Morphology: Introduction
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word

Morphs which realise a particular

morphemes and which are conditioned
(phonologically, lexically, or
grammatically) are called the
allomorphs of that morpheme,
Every allomorph is a morph,
A morph which realizes more than one
morpheme (person, gender, number) is
called a porte-manteau morpheme

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Words

learning to talk in early childhood seems to be a

matter of putting words together, not of taking
sentences apart (The example of a child),
Sentences come later, we are inclined to feel,
when words are strung together meaningfully.
there are quite a few circumstances in which we
use single words,
words on their own, outside sentences, can be
sorted and classified in various ways,
A dictionary lists them according to their
spelling in alphabetical order.

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Words and dictionaries

A dictionary entry is an association of a word,
alphabetically listed, with a definition of what it means
plus information about grammar and pronunciation,
A word is a building-block of a sentence with a
meaning that is unpredictable
How many words? Mary goes to Edinburgh next week,
and she intends going to Washington next month.
14? to and next repeated: 12?
The 2 to and the 2 next are Tokens of the same
type
Words as listed in dictionaries entries are types

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Words and meaning

some words are characterised by the fact that their

sound seems to reflect their meaning fairly directly.
A meaning, such as smoothness or wetness or both
in the set of words
slip, slop, slurp, slide, slither, sleek, slick, slaver, slug.
However, the associations between most words and
their meanings are purely conventional,
We also have words that are composed of
independently identifiable parts, where the meaning
of the parts is sufficient to determine the meaning of
the whole word.

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Words and meaning

The vast majority of words are words

whose meanings, if not strictly
predictable, are at any rate motivated in
the sense that they can be reliably
guessed by someone who encounters
them for the first time in an appropriate
context.

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Word

Walk walks walks walked walking

Walk: the citation form
We have to make a distinction between
the notion word in an abstract sense
(lexeme) and
the notion word in the sense of
concrete word as used in a sentence

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Word

The concrete words walk, walks, walked,

and walking can be qualified as word
forms of the lexeme walk.
Small capitals are used to denote
lexemes when necessary to avoid
confusion between these two notions
word.
The rules for computing the different
forms of lexemes are called rules of
inflection

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Morphology

The words walk, walks, walked, and walking show

a relationship in form and meaning of a
systematic nature, since similar patterns occur for
thousands of other verbs of English.
The subdiscipline of linguistics that deals with
such patterns is called morphology.
The existence of such patterns also implies that
word may have an internal constituent structure.
For instance, walking can be divided into the
constituents walk and -ing.
Therefore, morphology deals with the internal
constituent structure of words as well.

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WORD

words as units of meaning versus units of

sentence structure
words as pronounceable entities (word forms)
versus more abstract entities (sets of word
forms)
inflectionally related word forms (forms of the
same word) versus derivationally related
words (different words with a shared base)
the distinction between compound words and
phrases
the relationship between the internal structure
of a word and its meaning

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Dictionary makers assume that these

forms of the lexeme WALK are formed
according to rules, and therefore need
not be specified individually in the
dictionary.

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LEXEME

lexeme is :

a (potential or actual) member of a major

lexical category, having both form and
meaning but being neither, and
existing outside of any particular syntactic
context. In actual use, though, any instance
of a lexeme appears in a sentence, a
grammatical and pragmatic context.

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1. Which of the following words may not deserve to

be regarded as lexical items, and so may not need
to be listed in a dictionary of modern English? Why?

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a. break breaking breakable breakage

read reading readable
punish punishing punishable punishment
b. conceive conceivable conception
receive receptive receivable reception
perceive perceptive perceivable perception
c. gregarious gregariousness gregariously
happy happiness happily
high highness highly

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4. Which of the following phrases (in italics) may deserve to be regarded

as lexical items? Why? (you may like to consult a native speaker about
what these sentences mean.)

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a. They put the cat among the hamsters.

b. They put the cat among the pigeons.
c. They put out the cat before going to bed.
d. They put out the light before going to bed.
e. They really put themselves out for us.
f. They looked really put out.
g. Roger is a man who keeps his promises.
h. Richard is a man of his word.
i. A man in the road witnessed the accident.
j. The man in the street is not interested in economic policy.
k. Rupert is a man about town.
l. I met a man with an umbrella.
m. May the best man win.
n. The best man unfortunately lost the rings on the way to the wedding.

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Morphology-wise, this is a very

resourceful website:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/

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