Linguistics & Semantics

Lesson 3: Morphology

Morphemes and Words

The morpheme is defined as the minimal unit of language which carries meaning. If we look at the word ‘dogs’ we can see two morphemes, that is, ‘dog’ and ‘s’. Other words such as ‘truthfully or unhappy’ can be divided into three morphemes ‘truth-ful-y’ and two morphemes ‘un-happy’. So ‘un’ means ‘not’, ‘happy’ describes a state of neural activity that produce a feeling of “well-being” and “contentment”. ‘Ful’ means having the quality of, while ‘truth’ implies the quality or state of being “faithful”, ‘y’ is an instance of specified action (suffix). We can say that the meaning of a morpheme always stays the same. When we look at the word ‘unbearable’ we intuitively feel that it is divided into ‘un’ ‘bear’ ‘able’.

Are we sure that this word is composed of three morphemes? And what can we do with the word ‘deambulation’? Is it right to divide it into de-am-bu-la-tion or are there any other combinations? We can split ‘cranberry’ into two morphemes ‘cran-berry’ but ‘cran’ does not occur alone as an independent term in English or as a morpheme in any other word as it does not carry any meaning of its own. Thus we must think of ‘morphemes’ as minimal meaning-carrying units because of the existence of some borderline case such as ‘cran’ in ‘cranberry’ or ‘ceive’ in ‘receive’ ‘deceive’ ‘conceive’. Instead, the word is considered as the smallest unit of grammar which can stand alone (boy (s), tree (s), cat (s): ‘boy’ is a word but ‘s’ is not a word: “Act, activate, activity, activities” are words but ‘ive, ity, ities’ are not words.

The word can also be a lexical or a functional word : a‘lexical’ word implies that the word is a ‘full word’ and it is perhaps understood when it is associated with a contentful concept. In word like ‘boy’, ‘dog’, ‘tree’ we might think of concept they express by relating to a picture or design of a typical boy, dog, or tree. If we think of verbs such as ‘to smile, to run, to read etc.’ we also need to have a contentful notion of what these activities are. The same happens with adjectives (when a person is described some adjectives must be employed: tall, heavy, kind etc.

These adjectives need to be associated with concepts which turn out to be a bit more abstract. Therefore a ‘lexical word’ is a morpheme which has a dictionary meaning, a full word, a content word (dog, cat, boy, girl, take, green etc. / cane, gatto, ragazzo, ragazza, prendere, verde etc.), while a ‘functional word’ (also called an empty word or a form word) is a word that has less of a contentful concept associated with it and is necessary to some functions in grammar (the (il), a (un), of (di), and (e)). So lexical categories consist of mostly lexical words, on the other hand, functional categories consist mostly of functional words. Verbs, nouns, adjectives (V, N, A) are the three basic lexical categories: determiners, complementations, conjunctions (D, C, C) are the three basic functional categories.

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