Morphology Flashcards
Lexeme
A word and its inflections, considered as a single item of the language - a word in an abstract sense > represents the core meaning shared by different forms . a ‘dictionary’ word
Characteristics of morphemes
- Internally indivisible - they cannot be further subdivided or analysed into smaller meaningful units
- Internally stable - nothing can be inserted into a morpheme
- Externally transportable - they can occur in contexts, e.g. disregard, disappear
- Different types of morphemes - lexical or grammatical
Free morphemes
Form a word on their own/are single words
- They cannot be broken down any further
- Free, lexical morphemes > carry the content of the message they convey - they can be ordinary nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
- Free functional morphemes > express structure relations within the sentence, they carry grammatical meaning, and a reused as function words - they can be articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns
Free lexical morphemes
Treated as an open class of words and include elements that are:
- In principle unlimited (new elements are constantly added), e.g. mansplaining, to ghost someone, adulting
- Bearers of lexical meaning
- Mostly variable in form
Free functional morphemes
- Represent a closed class of words
- Are limited > difficult to add new elements to the category
- Are fossilised/fixed > their form/meaning is not likely to change (although changes do happen at times)
- Do not bear lexical but grammatical meaning (articles give information about definitives) > grammatical concept/linguistic property
Bound morphemes
- Cannot stand alone and have to be attached to another morpheme > are always affixes and usually have abstract meanings
- The part of the word that an affix is attached to is called the stem or the base
- In words with more than one morpheme, there is a base morpheme + one or more affixes, e.g. undressed
- Some theorists distinguish between a root and a stem/base of a word > root = a base that cannot be analysed into further morphemes, although it carries the central essence of the word’s meaning, e.g. readable > read = base. Readability > readable = base, read = root
Derivational morphemes
- Related to the lexical aspect - bound morphemes involved in the process of derivation > creation of new meanings by adding derivational affixes to a base
- Derivational morphology gives new lexemes (related to the same word family) e.g. sing- singer, joy-joyful
- It can also change the grammatical category (but this is not always the case)
- Derivational affixes can be suffixes, prefixes, infixes or circumfixes - in English they are primarily suffixes and prefixes, with the suffixes highly outnumbering the prefixes
Inflectional morphemes
Related to the functional aspect > bound morphemes involved in the process of inflection > altering the form of a word in order to indicate certain grammatical properties (e.g. tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and mood)
- indicate the grammatical function of a word
- are always suffixes in English - they are always found at the end of the word and cannot be prefixes or others
- Never change the grammatical category of a word
- don’t create new lexemes but different forms of the same word, so there’s no change in meaning
Inflectional morphology in more detail
- do not change the grammatical category of a word
- do not create new lexemes but lead to different forms of the same word, so there’s no change in meaning > the different word forms of a single lexeme/different inflected forms create an inflectional paradigm
- Inflectional morphology is obligatory - formed by syntactic requirements
- It is also productive (meaning that nearly all verbs and nouns follow the inflection morphology rules)
- Inflectional morphemes (suffixes) are used to mark number, tense, gender, person, case
How many inflectional morphemes are there in English?
- 8 (all suffixes)
- Attached to nouns (2), verbs (4) and adjectives (2)
Inflectional morphemes for nouns
Number - s (plural)
Case - ‘s (possession) - only marker for case appearing in English noun phrases
Inflectional morphemes for verbs
Person - s (3rd person singular, presen)
Aspect - ing (present participle), -ed, -en (past participle)
Tense - ed marks past tense
Inflectional morphemes for adjectives
Comparative - er
Superlative - est
Allomorphs
- One of several realisations of a morpheme/one of a closely related set of forms (morphs) which realise a morpheme > in different phonological or morphological environments, the same morpheme might manifest through different forms, with no change in meaning
- Allomorphs of the same morpheme are in a relationship of complementary distribution > the presence of one excludes the possibility of using another (mutually exclusive)
Allophones - plural forms
- In English, the morpheme that marks plural has several allomorphs > one morpheme with different realisations
- 3 different regular allomorphs of the plural ending > phonological allomorphs > similar pronunciation/phonologically similar > which one is chosen depends on the phonological contexts - phonologically conditioned allomorphy
