UNIT 1.
AN INTRODUCTION TO MORPHOLOGY
I. KINDS OF LINGUISTIC INFORMATION RELATED TO A WORD
1. Phonological information: the pronunciation of a word.
2. Morphological information: the internal structure of a word.
Ex: house (can’t be divided), careful (can be split up into care and -ful)
3. Syntactic information: how a word fits into larger units such as phrases or sentences.
Ex: She talks a lot about him. (verb)
They wonder if their application is acceptable.( adjective)
4. Semantic information: examine the meaning of a word.
Ex: brother (male sibling), car (vehicle or automobile)
5. Pragmatic information: examine the use of a word in discourse.
Ex: Cop (spoken language)=policeman(written language)
Kid (spoken language) = child (written language)
Pal (spoken language) = friend (written language)
II. THE DIFFERENT SENSES OF “WORDS”
Three basic senses of the term “word” an be distinguished: the lexeme, the word form, and the
grammatical word.
1. The lexeme: the term “lexeme” is used to refer to a set of grammatical words which share the
same basic meaning, similar forms and the same word class.
Ex: - dissembles, dissembled, dissembling: different realizations of the lexeme “dissemble”.
(They all share a core meaning and belong to the same word class, although they are spelled and
pronounced differently)
- hand, hands (different forms of the lexeme “hand”-noun)
- hand, hands, handed, handing (different forms of the lexeme “hand”-verb).
PRACTICE:
a. Which lexeme do the following words belong to?
- loved, loves
- dark, darker, darkest
- think, thought
- criterion, criteria
- see, seeing, sees, saw, seen
b. Do you think that the following word pairs belong to the same lexeme?
revolve, revolution
play, player
photograph, photography
origin, original
beautiful, beautifully
differ, difference
I, me
bear (v), bear (n)
go, went
revolve, dissolve
meat, meet
a/an
lodger, lodgement
wash, rewash
breakable, breakage
2. The word form: the physical realizations, either the orthographical word (in writing) or the
phonological word (in speaking) of a lexeme are called word forms.
Ex: see, sees, seeing, saw, seen are five word forms belonging to the same lexeme “see”
PRACTICE:
What words belong to the same word family or lexeme as “sing”, “walk”, “run”, “child”,
“woman”, “tooth”?
3. A morphosyntactic word (a grammatical word): consists of a lexeme and associated
grammatical meaning.
Ex: I usually hit my dog when she is naughty.
Yesterday I hit him because he had chewed my slippers.
hit (verb-present tense)
hit hit (verb-past tense)
4. Three major families of words
a. Lexical words: Lexical words are nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. They have
fairly independent meanings and may be meaningful even in isolation or in a series. They are the
main carriers of meaning in a text.
A noun is a word that names a person, a thing, a place or an idea.
A verb is a word that shows action, or links to the subjects to a word or a phrase that tells about
the subject.
An adjective is used to describe something.
An adverb shows us the time, place, manner, or degree.
b. Function words: prepositions, determiners, pronouns, numerals, auxiliaries, coordinators,
subordinators, wh-words, the negator not,
Prepositions show the relationships between a noun and another word in a sentence.
Determiners go in front of the nouns to identify what the nouns refers to. Ex: this, that, these,
those.
Pronouns take the place of a noun or nouns. Ex: we, I
Auxiliaries: be, do, does, will, can, may
Coordinators:Coordinating conjunctions between two units. Ex: or, and….
Subordinators: subordiating conjunctions that introduce a dependent clause to a main clause. Ex:
if, when. Although, after, beause…
c. Inserts: Inserts do not form an integral part of a syntactic structure, but are inserted rather
freely in the text. They are often marked off by intonation, pauses, or by punctuation marks in
writing. They characteristically carry emotional and interactional meanings and are especially
frequent in spoken texts.
Examples: Hm hm, Yeah, Well, So
5. Characteristics of words
- The word is an uninterruptible unit. When elements are added to a word to modify its
meaning, they are never included within that word. They respect the internal stability of the word
and are added either at the beginning as prefixes of the word or at the end as suffixes.
For example: the prefix un- and the suffix –able may be added to the words aware and drink
and give unaware and drinkable respectively
- The word may consist of one or more morphemes. When a word consists of one morpheme, it
is called a simple word. However, when a word consists of more than one morpheme, it is called
either a compound word or a complex word.
+ A complex word consists of a free form (morpheme) and a bound form (morpheme).
+ A compound word consists of 2 or more free forms (morphemes).
- A word should belong to a specific word class or part of speech.
Where the same form appears in more than one class, as frequently happens in English, we
regard the various occurences as separate words (for example, smoke (verb) as distinct from
smoke (noun)).
PRACTICE
EXERCISE 1. Match words in column A to column B
A B
Pragmatics meaning
Semantics language use
Syntax linguistic sounds
Morphology the combination of words to form sentences
Phonology internal structure of words
EXERCISE 2. What linguistic fields do the following statements refer to?
a. What makes two words “seed” and “deed” different is the consonants /s/ and /d/. Thus these
are called distinctive sounds.
b. Her boyfriend gave her a big surpirse. “ A big surprise” is the object complement of the
sentence.
c. “father” has the properties “male” and “adult”. Similary, “child” has the property “human”
and “young”
d. A complete English sentence will always contain these components :
Noun Phrase (NP) Verb Phrase (VP)
Mike likes pizza.
e. /s/ is pronounced as /z/ before a voiced sound.
f. We add the prefixes “im”, “dis” at the beginning of the words.
g. If you want to forbid someone to enter the room, you will say “ Don’t enter the room.”
h. Aspirate a voiceless stop /p/, /t/, or /k/ when it occurs word initially or syllable initially before
a stressed vowel
i. “ unhappy” is made up of “un-” and “happy”
EXERCISE 3. Determine the word class of each of the following words
a. betterment
b. the
c. him
d. elegant
e. inconvenience
f. eloquently
g. comply
h. inasmuch as
i. over
j. friendly
k. daily
EXERICISE 4. Are these words simple, compound or complex?
1.desks
2. fly
3.dislike
4. milkman
5. untie
6. interesting
7. delight
8. textbook
9. takeover
10. worker
11. crybaby
12. motorbike
13. faster
14. prewash
15. blackboard
16. opposition
17. giraffe
18. fraud
