Sultan Moulay Slimane University L.

Meriem Ouahidi
Department of English
Introduction to Linguistics S4

Morphology: The Words of Language

Morphology– study of internal structure of words. It studies the way in which words
are constructed or arranged out of smaller meaningful units.
The term Morphology can refer to three different things
 Description of the behavior of morphemes and how they are combined .
 Derivational, inflectional and compositional processes of word formation
occurring, in a specific language.
 Description of word formation processes.
Morphemes
Morphemes in morphology are the smallest units that carry meaning or fulfill some
grammatical function. The word house itself consists of one morpheme and because it
can stand by itself it can be called a free morpheme, that is, it is a word itself. Examples
are house, work, high, us and to. What is more, free morphemes can be subdivided into
two categories: lexical morphemes and functional morphemes. Lexical morphemes
are words that have some meaning – verbs, adjectives, nouns, like for example print,
house, pretty, fire, go, girl. As there is no problem in adding new entities to this group of
words they are treated as an open class of words. Functional morphemes, on the other
hand, are a closed class of words, articles, prepositions, pronouns which do not carry
any meaning on their own, but only fulfill a grammatical function.
 In the word houses there are two morphemes house, which is free, and s which is a
bound morpheme because it cannot stand by itself as it would have no meaning. In
other words, Morphemes that must be attached to another morpheme to receive
meaning are bound morphemes. In the second example above the bound morpheme s
was attached to house – a free morpheme, which in this case can be also called a stem.
Stem is what a bound morpheme is attached to.

Classification of Morphemes
• Root – nucleus of the word that affixes attach too. In English, most of the roots are free.
In other words, root is the form when all the affixes are removed. For example, the form
"accept" is the root for "unacceptable"
Compounds contain more than one root: home·work;
• affix – a morpheme that is not a root; it is always bound
– suffix: an affix that is attached to the end of a word, e.g. plural -s on nouns, talk·ing,
quick·ly.
-prefix: an affix that is attached to the front of a word, e.g. pro- in pro.active, un·happy,
pre·existing;
– infix: an affix that is inserted into a word. It is common in Austronesian and
Austroasiatic languages
– circumfix: morpheme having two parts that are placed around a stem
Suffixes are more common than prefixes which are more common than
infixes/circumfixes
 Scholars differentiate between derivational morphology and inflectional
morphology.
Derivational morphemes are affixes which are added to a lexeme to change its meaning
and /or function. They are used to make a new, different lexeme (for example, -ly
changes the adjective sad into the adverb sadly).
 Most derivational morphemes change the part of speech, for example, -ance
changes the verb resemble into the noun resemblance.
 The majority of derivational morphemes that don't change the part of speech are
prefixes, for example, adding un- changes the meaning of the adjective happy but
it is still an adjective unhappy.
Inflectional morphemes are affixes which carry grammatical meaning (for example, the
plural -s in cats or progressive -ing in sailing). They do not change the part of speech or
meaning of the word; they function to ensure that the word is in the appropriate form so
the sentence is grammatically correct.
 All inflectional morphemes in English are suffixes and are added after any
derivational suffixes.
 The most common inflectional morphemes are used in verb inflection (for
example, -ed in raced, -ing in racing, -s in races) but there are suffixes for noun
inflection (for example, plural -s in horses and possessive -'s in Norma's) and
 adjective inflection (for example, comparative -er in faster and superlative -est in
fastest).
When affixes are added to a base or stem, there is usually a specific order for
adding them. Inflectional suffixes are added last, and, once they are added, no more
derivational affixes can be added. An example of this is given below for the word
deconstructions, showing the order in which the various affixes are added:
 The derivational prefix de- is added to the verb base construct to get the verb
deconstruct
 The derivational suffix -ion is added to the verb stem deconstruct to get the
noun deconstruction.
Although this division seems to be quite clear cut there are some difficulties in
analyzing certain words. Let’s take the word ‘reactor’ as an example. On the basis of the
information above it could be stated that it consists of two morphemes: a stem actor and
a derivational morpheme re-, which is obviously not the case. Moreover, there are
problems with the English plural, for instance it is easy to identify morphemes in the
word houses (house – lexical free morpheme + s bound inflectional morpheme), but what
about tooth and teeth? In order to solve such problems linguists introduced a term
morphs which are the forms that represent morphemes. For instance, in the word dogs,
the morph s represents the morpheme ‘plural’ and in the word oxen the morph is en.
There is a number of other peculiarities in a language like English, however morphology
is still more highly developed for inflectional languages.
Allomorph
One morpheme can be realized in any form of morph. This real form of a morpheme, that
can be more than one, is called allomorph. For example, the "plural" morpheme in
English has such allomorphs as -es, -s, or -en. ,  . These are the example of allomorphs;
 Shoes; shoe + -s,‘s’ is allomorph
 Watches; watch + -es, ‘es’ is allomorph
1. Phonologically conditioned allomorph
The choice of allomorph is predictable on the basis of the pronounciation
 Allomorph of the indefinite article : an (before vowels, ex : an elephant) and a
(before consonant, ex : a dog) both of them have meaning one,single.
 Allomorphs of the regular past tense morpheme
1. /id/ after d,t : hated
 2. /t/ after all other voiceless sounds : picked
3. /d/ after all other voiced sounds : wedged
4. /im/ before bilabial sounds : impossible
5. /il/ before consonant /l/ : illegal
6. /in/ elsewhere : independent
 Some allomorph of the negative prefix in-
Word Formation Processes
Nowadays, the terms ‘word formation’ does not have a clear cut, universally
accepted usage. It is sometimes refers to all processes connected with changing the form
of the word by, for example, affixation, which is a matter of morphology. In its wider
sense, word formation denotes the processes of creation of new lexical units. Although it
seems that the difference between morphological change of a word and creation of a
new term are quite easy to perceive there is sometimes a dispute as to whether blending
is still a morphological change or making a new word.
There are, of course, numerous word formation processes that do not arouse any
controversies and are very similar in the majority of languages:
 Compounding is a process in which two different words are joined together to
denote one thing. For example, flower-pot is a compound made of two words:
flower and pot, but it does not denote two things, it refers to one object. Some
English compounds include: windmill, waterfall, fingerprint, scarecrow.
Compounds are pronounced as one unit, but sometimes difficulties in writing
arise: some compounds are written with hyphens: full-time, good-looking; some
are written separately: bank account, mini skirt; and some can be written in both
ways.
 Blending is very similar to compounding, but it is characterized by taking only
parts of words and joining them. Famous English examples include: smog which
combines smoke and fog, motel made of motor and hotel, Spanglish which is
combination of Spanish and English; and guesstimate, from guess and estimate.
 Clipping is shortening or reducing long words. It is very common in English
which can be seen on the following examples: information is clipped to info,
advertisement to advert or ad, influenza to flu, telephone to phone.
 Coinage is creation of a totally new word. This word formation process is not
frequent; however, large corporations attempt to outdo one another to invent
 short eye-catching names for their products. Some examples of these could
include: aspirin or xerox.
 Borrowing is taking a word from one language and incorporating it into another.
The English language has been very absorbent and took over words from all over
the world, some of them include: biology, boxer, ozone – from German; jackal,
kiosk, yogurt – from Turkish; pistol, robot – from Czech.
There is also a special type of borrowing called calque or loan translation. Here there is a
direct translation of the elements that a term consists of from the source language into
the target language. For example, the English word worldview is thought to be the calque
of the German Weltanschauung, antibody calques German Antikörper.
 Acronym is a word formed from initial letters of a few words in a phrase or a
name. Some acronyms are pronounced by saying each letter separately, as in CD,
DVD, FBI. Some are pronounced as words, like NATO, laser, AIDS.
 Eponym takes place when a name is used as a word. Some well-known eponyms
include: sandwich, or Hoover. They are very frequently used in science where
units of measurement are named after people, like: hertz, volt, (degree) Celsius.
 Backformation is a process in which a word changes its form and function. Word
of one type, which is usually a noun, is reduced and used as a verb. To show it on
an example: the English word arms meaning weapon was back formed to arm to
mean provide weapons, similarly edit was back formed from editor, or typewrite
from typewriter.
 Conversion is a change in function of a verb without changing its form. Nouns
start to be used as verbs like: bottle – to bottle, bottling: I’m bottling the compote;
butter – to butter, buttered: I’ve buttered the bread. Also, verbs can become
nouns: must – a must: Watching this film is a must; guess – a guess: It was a lucky
guess.
 Derivation is probably the most common word formation process in the English
language. It is achieved by adding affixes: prefixes – are added at the beginning of
a word, suffixes added to the end of a word, or infixes which are inserted inside a
word, but infixes are unusual in English. English prefixes include for example re-,
un-, mis-, pre-, dis-; suffixes include for instance -ful, -less, -able, -or.
The above-mentioned word formation processes are the most frequent or important
in the English language, but it is rarely the case that only one process occurs in one
word. Words can be loaned and then back formed, later on gaining an affix. There are
practically no boundaries to those processes other that human ingenuity.