Morphology

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Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

Contents

Words, word forms and lexemes

There are several difficulties in arriving at a consistent use of the term "word" in relation to other categories of linguistic description, and several criteria (prosodical, morphological, syntactical) have been suggested for the identification of words in a language. One of the main difficulties concerns the use of the term "word" both as a class and as any of its elements. The forms "love", "loves", "loving" and "loved", for instance, may be considered to be different "words" of English or different forms (variants) of the same "word", depending on the case.

In order to avoid ambiguities, the UNLarium differentiates between these two senses of "word". The first sense, the one in which "love", "loves", "loving" and "loved" are different "words", is called a word form. Word forms are therefore "the physically definable units which one encounters in a stretch of writing (bounded by spaces) or speech (where identification is more difficult, but where there may be phonological clues to identify boundaries, such as a pause, or juncture features)" (Crystal, 2008, p. 522).

The second sense, the one in which "love", "loves", "loving" and "loved" are "the same word", is called a lexeme. The lexeme is an abstract underlying unit that corresponds to a set of different word forms reputed to be part of the same word class.

Morphemes

Different word forms are said to be part of the same lexeme if they share the same fundamental morphological identity. This means that word forms are analysed into smaller units, called morphemes, which are the smallest linguistic units that have semantic meaning.

There are two main different types of morphemes:

  • root - the primary unit of a word unit, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content. Words may have one (“fire”, “man”, “dish”, “washer”) or several roots (“fireman”, "dishwasher");
  • affix - a morpheme attached to the root to modify its meaning.

Affixes

Affixes are divided into several categories, depending on their position and their role with reference to the root. The most important positional categories are:

  • prefix (PFX) - Appears at the front of the root (such as "un" in "undo", or "re" in "rewrite")
  • suffix (SFX) - Appears at the back of the root (such "s" in "tables", or "er" in "writer")
  • infix (IFX) - Appears within the root (very rare in English, such as "ma" in "sophistimacated")
  • circumfix (CCX) - Appears at the front and at the back of the root (very rare in English, such as "a" + "ed" in "ascattered")

As for their roles, there are two main different types of affixes:

  • inflectional affix - assign grammatical properties (such as number, gender, tense, person) to the root in order to form the different word forms of the same lexeme ("s" in "tables", "ed" in "loved", etc)
  • derivational affix - form a new lexeme by modifying the meaning (and sometimes the category) of the root ("un" in "unhappy", "ness" in "happiness").

Morphological structure

In the UNLarium, we recognize five main morphological categories:

Examples

lexeme word forms root derivational affixes inflectional affixes stem
1 here here here
2 happy happy happy
3 unhappy happy un- unhappy
4 table, tables table -s table
5 happiness happy -ness happiness
6 love, loves, loving, loved love -s, -ing, -ed love
7 hermoso, hermosa, hermosos, hermosas (es = beautiful) hermos- -o, -a, -s hermos-
8 unbreakableness break un-, -able, -ness unbreakableness
9 fireman, firemen fire, man fireman
10 part of speech, parts of speech part, of, speech -s part of speech
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