Morphology
What is morphology
is the study of every unit that makes a word and their different parts from a grammar context.
Morphemes
the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language
Characteristics
• Meaning may be directly linked to suprasegmentally phonological units, such as tone or stress.
• The meaning of a morpheme with a given form may vary, depending on its immediate environment.
Stem
the root or roots of a word, together with any derivational affixes, to which inflectional affixes are added
word tokens: when we count every instance in which a word occurs in a sentence, regardless of whether that word has occurred before or not.
Simplex and complex
simplex words are just words that can be counted as the smallest units of meaning may be whole simple words
complex words or morphemes which are formed by many parts
examples: man, run, big
example: unfaithful is formed by 3 morphemes, un/faith/ful
word type:is when we are counting a word once, no matter how many times it repeats itself in a text.
Lexemes: Words that are part of the same family (examples: walk, walking, walked)
Types of morphemes
Bound morphemes:it can be said that bound morphine are the parts of a word that are attached to that word by force.
Free morphemes: Words that only contain one morpheme and can go without any other add morpheme. Some examples are: cat, apple, road, eye, etc.….
Lexical Morphemes: are those that having meaning by themselves (more accurately, they have sense).
Functional or grammatical Morphemes: From the same text, any article (A/The/An), conjunction (of/but) or preposition can functional or grammatical morphemes.
They can be nouns (Peter), verbs (walk) or adjectives (ugly)
Normally we can find in the bound morphemes the affixes
end of a word (suffix)
beginning (prefix)
Derivational Affixes: Can go to the start (prefix) or at the end of the sentence (suffix).
Examples
prefix: pre, ex, dis, un
suffix: nes, ful,ment ul
Inflectional Affixes: In English we have 8 inflectional affixes, also they dont alter the meaning of a word.
{PLU} = plural Noun -s boys
{POSS} = possessive Noun -’s boy’s
{COMP} = comparative Adj -er older
{SUP} = superlative Adj -est oldest
{PRES} = present Verb -s walks
{PAST} past Verb -ed walked
{PAST PART} = past participle Verb -en driven
{PRES PART} = present participle Verb -ing driving
Bound stem
A bound stem are words aren't words by themselves, but do carry specific meanings, and which can be made into new words by adding one or more prefixes or suffixes.