1 / 24

Morphology

Morphology. A short introduction. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwwyhndrobwllllantysiligogogoch. (a town name in Wales). Morphology: Background and Basic Terms. How is it that we can use and understand words in our language that we have never encountered before?.

cherie
Download Presentation

Morphology

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Morphology A short introduction

  2. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwwyhndrobwllllantysiligogogoch (a town name in Wales)

  3. Morphology: Background and Basic Terms • How is it that we can use and understand words in our language that we have never encountered before?

  4. Morphology: Background and Basic Terms (2) Morphology : the component of a grammar that deals with the internal structure of words.

  5. Morphology: Background and Basic Terms (3) • Adjectives are abstract; they are not real forms. The real forms that represents them (in-,-s, and –ful) are therefore usually called morphs. (Hocket,1947)

  6. Definition • Type of investigation which analyzes all those basic “elements” which are used in language elements= linguistic message (morphemes). (Yule:1985) • The study of forms of words (Matthews:1979) • While syntax is concerned with how words arrange themselves into constructions, morphology is concerned with the forms of words themselves. (Malmkjaer:1991)

  7. The Minimal Meaningful Units of Language(Words Versus Morphemes) A word need not have any special phonetic properties: some words bear stress but others do not, some words set off by intonational signals but others are not. a door - adore

  8. Tone languages: a language is said to have tone when differences in word meaning are signaled by differences in pitch H ‘mother’ High tone [ma] L H ‘hemp’ Low rise [ma] L H M ‘horse’ Fall rise [ma] H L ‘scold’ High fall [ma]

  9. A word is a minimal free form • (a) The hunters pursued the bear. • (b) The bear was pursued by the hunters. Words, though they may be definable as minimal free forms, are not minimal meaningful units of language. The word hunters can stand alone (a free form), nonetheless consists of three meaningful parts : hunt, er, ands. (Morphemes). The minimal meaningful units of language ARE NOT words, but arbitrary signs or MORPHEMES.

  10. Morpheme • A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function (Yule:1985) • The smallest linguistic unit that has meaning (Johnson & Johnson:1999) • The elementary particle of lexicogrammar, the thing out of which words are built (Halliday:2004). • The smallest meaningful unit in a language. A morpheme cannot be divided without altering or destroying its meaning. For example, the English word kind is a morpheme. If the d is removed, it changes to kin, which has a different meaning. (Richard & Schmidt:2002)

  11. Morphological Description: Elements of Morphology (Yule) lexical free functional Morphemes derivational bound inflectional Yule:1985

  12. Free and Bound Morphemes • Free: A form which can be used on its own : Betty, horse, red, write, love, drive • Bound: a linguistic form (a MORPHEME) which is never used alone but must be used with another morpheme, e.g. as an AFFIX or COMBINING FORM. For example, the English suffix -ingmust be used with a verb stem: writing, loving, driving. (Richard & Schmidt:2002)

  13. Bound Morphemes : Derivational Morphemes • used to make new words in the language and different grammatical category from the stem. The derivational morphemes -ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness. • [[good](Adj) ness] N

  14. Bound Morphemes : Inflectional Morphemes • are not used to make new words in the language , but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word • Plural/Singular, tense, comparative/possessive form • English : All inflectional morphemes are suffixes.

  15. Bound Morphemes Bound Inflectional Derivational Suffix Suffix and prefix New words Plural/Singular, tense, comparative/possessive form

  16. Free Morphemes Free functional lexical Conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns. Ordinary nouns, adjectives, verbs

  17. The elements of morphology:The boy’s wildness shocked the teachers.

  18. Morphological Description: Elements of Morphology (Bauer) inflection Morphology derivation word- formation composition/ compounding Bauer:1983

  19. Word-formation:Composition/ Compounding • Two or more words combine into a morphological unit (Marchand:1969) • The combination of two free forms or words that have an otherwise independent existence. (Adams:1979)

  20. Word-formation:Other word-formation types • Backformation: occurs when suffix is removed from a complex word (liaison – to liaise) • Blend: where normally initial and terminal segments of two words are joined together to create a new word: brunch (breakfast +lunch), chunnel (channel+tunnel), fantabulous (fantastic+fabulous). • Acronyms : words formed from the initial letters of a fixed phrase or title : SALT (strategic arms limitation talks), misty (more ideologically sound than you).

  21. Allomorph • Any of the different forms of a MORPHEME • For example, in English the plural morpheme is often shown in writing by adding -s to the end of a word, e.g. cat /kæt/ – cats /kæts/. Sometimes this plural morpheme is pronounced /z/, e.g. dog /dig/ – dogs /digz/, and sometimes it is pronounced /Iz/, e.g. class /kleNs/ – classes /`kleNsız/. /s/, /z/, and /Iz/ all have the same grammatical function in these examples, they all show plural; they are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme.

  22. Word Structure • The structure of the entire word may be represented by means of either a set of labeled brackets or a tree diagram. V ] [[[hospital] ize ed ] N V V Af V Af N iz ed hospital

  23. Discussion • 1. Draw the appropriate tree structure for each of these words: • a) unhappiness c) fearlessly • b) denationalization d) pre-viewer • 2. What are the functional morphemes in the following sentences: • The old man sat on a chair and told them tales of the woe • 3. What are the inflectional morphemes in the following phrases: • a) the teacher’s books b) the newest model

More Related