Morphology - The Formation of Words

Last week we studied the sounds within a language, beginning with its smallest units like /t/ for example. This week we will go a step further and look at the morphemes or units that actually carry meaning. Let’s start the discussion about morphology by looking at one of the longest words in the English dictionary:

This is what morphology is all about: the study of the structure of word forms.

VIDEO SESSION # 5 Morphology
https://youtu.be/syjbhT45J14

This WEEK covers the study of the lexicon or vocabulary, a fascinating field of the unit word, its form (morphology) and its content or meaning (semantics). Let’s start with a flash back of week 1 module 2: “English is classified as an “analytical language with an isolating tendency” compared to that classification of the Romance languages which is “synthetic with an affixing tendency” In the lexical level, the tendency of English is to create “new” root words with processes such as shortening, conversion, and compounding; affixation (adding prefixes and suffixes) is not common as a word forming process while In Spanish and all other Romance languages, affixation is the primary source of new word formation.

When we studied the phonological level, we analyzed the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit of language, and although it was capable of distinguishing between words through minimal pairs (/bIn/ - /pIn/) it did not carry any meaning in itself. In this session, we will study the smallest meaningful unit of language, the morpheme, which does carry meaning by itself e.g. un-happy (not) or happi-ly (in a ___ way).

According to the possibility of standing alone (happy) or being attached to a root (un- and –ly), morphemes are classified as free (alone) or bound (attached). When we discussed the characteristics of English words coming from the Germanic stratus, we saw that most of those Anglo-Saxon words were root words made up of free morphemes, while the other half of the English lexicon (coming mostly from French due to the Norman 1066 invasion) was mainly affixed words with bound morphemes attached.

Bound morphemes (mostly affixes) are classified according to the position of their attachments; if they are attached to the beginning of the word, they are called prefixes (un-happy) and if the attachment occurs at the end of the word, they are called suffixes (happi-ly) The process by which we attach bound morphemes to a free morpheme is called affixation, but this is something we will see more thoroughly when we study the processes of word formation.

One important aspect to bear in mind is not to confuse morphemes with syllables. Morphemes are lexical units while syllables -in English- are phonological units; and though sometimes they might coincide in monosyllabic words (put, go, see, etc), many a time one single morpheme may be polysyllabic (de-sire, a-gree, res-pect)

The type of affixation we have seen so far in all our examples is the type that turns one word class (noun, verb, adjective) into another e.g. happy (adj) à happiness (noun) or changes the meaning while keeping the same word class e.g. happy (adj) à unhappy (adj) We call this type of process lexical affixation, or derivation, but there is another type of affixation very familiar to language ESL teachers, inflexion, which is the one in charge of conjugating words to express grammatical meanings such as –ed, -ing, -s (plural and 3rd person singular) - er (comparative) and – est (superlative) Inflexion does not change the word class nor the lexical meaning of the original root, it only affects its grammar.

Inflexions in English are much simpler than in most Romance languages for all the typological reasons we already discussed in previous sessions. English has only one inflexion mark (-(e) s) for the 3rd person singular of verbs in the simple present while Spanish has six; in the preterit or past tense Spanish can add up to 12 different forms only in regular verbs while English regular counterparts has only one (-ed) However, the simplicity of the morphemes in English is overshadowed by the complexity of the pronunciation of those two morphemes –s and –ed since each of them has three voiced and voiceless variants or allophones (see {assimilation} & {vocal cords}) E.g. She stops /s t a p s/  - She stabs /s t æ b z/ - She watches /w a t? I z/  -  She stopped / s t a p t/   -   She stabbed /s t æ b d/   -   She visited /v I s ? t I d/.

The rest of the inflexions do not constitute a huge problem for our English learners since with the exception of the –er –est of the adjective’s comparative and superlative degrees, the rest of them, as in the case of the regular plural –s are usually universal for most languages.