What is morphology?

1. What is morphology?

2. Starter What do the words in this sentence mean? The plogs glorped bliply. • How many plogs were there? • What were they doing? • Were they doing it now or in the past? • How or in what way were they doing it?

3. Key definitions • Units smaller than words can carry meaning. These are called morphemes. Words can be made up of one or more morphemes: • One morpheme dog, elephant, establish, child • Two morphemes dog s, establish ment, child ish • Three morphemes dis establish ment, child ish ness • In theory there is no limit to the number of morphemes a word can have however in English it is six. • Anti dis establish ment arian ism

4. There are four kinds of morphemes • Independent or free. These morphemes can stand on their own. e.g. dog, child • Dependent or bound. These morphemes must be attached to another morpheme. e.g. dog s, child ren • Grammatical. These give grammatical information and mark the role of the word in the sentence e.g. dog s (shows more than one); walk ed (shows past tense) • Creative or derivational. These form new words. e.g. un happy, resource ful

5. Development Identify the individual morphemes in the following word list: pigs, barked, unlikely, motherhood, salty, cherry, taller, hammer, displease, hardship, superheroes, player, shamelessly, nonsensical, supersonic, collided, anglers, supermarket. Label the morphemes, remembering that there may be more than one label.

6. e.g. pig s Dependent morpheme Grammatical (shows plural) independent morpheme

7. Extension Pick your own examples of morphemes and label them.

8. Plenary Design a pictorial analogy to represent bound/free/ derivational and bound morphemes? e.g. trees/roots/leaves Use this picture/pictures to explain the terminology and function of morphology.