Linguistics & Semantics

Lesson 3: Morphology

Types of Morphemes

Morphemes: they are the smallest units of language, that is, any part of a word that cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts including the whole world itself. Examples: items, stems. The word ‘stems’ can be divided into meaningful parts (stem/ and plural suffix ‘s’). Neither of these can be divided into smaller parts that have meaning. For this reason ‘stem’ and ‘s’ are to be seen as morphemes. Free morphemes can stand alone as independent words ‘stem’, bound morphemes cannot stand alone as independent words and they need to be attached to other morphemes.

Affixes have plural ‘s’ and are always bound while sometimes ‘root’ can be bound. Examples: ‘meaning-ful or ceive of deceive’. Content morphemes are morphemes that have relatively more specific meaning than function morphemes and fall into the classes of Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb. Functional morphemes are morphemes that have relatively less specific meaning than content morphemes; their function consists of signalling relationships between other morphemes.

They generally fall into classes such as Articles (a, the) Prepositions (of, at), Auxiliary Verbs (was smiling, have opened). Simple words consist of single morphemes and the words cannot be analysed into smaller meaningful parts (item, dog, cat); complex words consist of root morphemes plus one or more affixes (items, dogs, reading, readers). Base is an element (free or bound, root morpheme or complex word) in which additional morphemes are attached. It is also called ‘stem’. A base can also be a single ‘root’ morpheme as in the following example: tolerant in intolerant. However the base can be regarded as a word itself that has more than one morpheme.

Here, there is an instance: ‘subconsciously: sub-conscious-ly’. We have the word ‘conscious’ as a base to form another word ‘subconsciously’. Root usually is free and is a morpheme around which words can be built thanks to the addition of affixes: the root ‘clear’ can have affixes added to it so as to form ‘clearer, clearest, unclear, clearly’. Affixes are bound morphemes which are attached to a base.

They are divided into ‘prefixes’ that are attached to the front of a base, ‘suffixes’ that are attached to the end of a base and ‘infixes’ that are rarely found in English and are inserted inside of a root. Examples: prefix ‘de’ (decodify), (deambulation), (decoder); ‘un’ (untrue), (untidy); suffix ‘ly’ (manily), ‘able’ (capable), ‘ous’ (dangerous). Examples with both prefixes and subfixes are ‘unspeakable’(un-speak-able), ‘subconsciously’ (sub-conscious-ly), ‘unbelievable’ (un-believe-able).

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7