Introduction to English Morphology

Introducing Morphology

What is morphology? 

Morphology is the study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined in the languages of the world, and the way forms of words are varied depending on how they’re used in sentences.

Morpheme, linguists define a morpheme as the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning. Simple words like giraffe, wiggle, or yellow are morphemes, but so are prefixes like re- and pre- and suffixes like -ize and –er. There’s far more to be said about morphemes but for now we can use the term morpheme to help us come up with a more precise and coherent definition of word. Word

define as one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language. Words that consist of only one morpheme is simple or simplex words. Words that are made up of more than one morpheme are called complex.

Words and lexemes, types and tokens
It’s useful to have some special terms for how we count words. Let’s say that if we are counting every instance in which a word occurs in a sentence, regardless of whether that word has occurred before or not, we are counting word tokens. If we count word tokens in the sentence we are counting a word once, no matter how many times it occurs in a sentence, we are counting word types. Lexemes can be thought of as families of words that differ only in their grammatical endings or grammatical forms; singular and plural forms of a noun (class, classes), present, past, and participle forms of verbs (walk, walks, walked, walking), different forms of a pronoun (I, me, my, mine) each represent a single lexeme. When we change the form of a word so that it fits in a particular grammatical context, we are concerned with what linguists call inflection. Inflectional word formation is word formation that expresses grammatical distinctions like number (singular vs. plural); tense (present vs. past); person (first, second, or third); and case (subject, object, possessive), among others.

Summary : Morphology is the study of words and word formation. In this chapter we have considered what a word is and looked at the distinction between word tokens, word types, and lexemes. We have divided word formation into derivation – the formation of new lexemes – and inflection, the different grammatical word forms that make up lexemes.

Words, dictionaries, and the mental lexicon

Morphologists, however, have the luxury of being more precise: we can define a word as a sequence of one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language.

Dictionaries come in all shapes and sizes, for all sorts of intended audiences. Size and audience are determined by individual publishers, and indeed the finished product is shaped by all sorts of market forces.

For the most part, dictionaries do not fix or codify the words of a language, but rather reflect the words that native speakers use. Those words are encoded in what we will call the mental lexicon, the sum total of word knowledge that native speakers carry around in their heads. By the mental lexicon the sum total of everything an individual speaker knows about the words of her language. This knowledge includes information about pronunciation, category (part of speech), and meaning, of course, but also information about syntactic properties (for example, whether a verb is transitive or intransitive), level of formality, and what lexicographers call ‘range of application’, that is, the specific conditions under which we might use the word. For example, I know that the word verandah is a noun, pronounced (in my American English) [vəɹændə], that it refers to a type of porch, and that I’d only use it in reference to the sort of porch one finds in the southern part of the US or perhaps in some exotic tropical country.
Gavagai problem is even if someone points and says a word, it is often not clear from the context what exactly is being pointed out.
Fast mapping is the ability to pick up new words on the basis of a few random exposures to them. In one experiment, Carey showed that children who were casually exposed to a new color name chromium during an unrelated activity (following instructions to pick up trays of various colors) were able to absorb the word and recall it even six weeks later. Experiments have shown that adults exhibit this fast mapping ability as well; while the ability to learn linguistic rules (say, of syntax or phonology) is thought to decline after puberty, the ability to learn new words remains robust.
Studies of aphasics – people whose language faculty has been impaired due to stroke or other brain trauma – show that there must be a past tense rule that speakers use for regular forms – even very frequent ones – and that irregular forms are stored whole, probably in a different part of the brain. Some aphasics display agrammatism; this means that they have difficulty in producing or processing function words in sentences, but can still produce and understand content words. Interestingly, agrammatic aphasics have difficulty producing or processing both regularly inflected forms (like the English past tenses), and also productively derived words (those with suffixes that we use frequently in making up new words – for example, -less as in shoeless or -ly as in darkly), whereas they have far less trouble with irregular forms like sang and flew.

Summary:  We have been concerned with the question of what constitutes a word. We have contrasted dictionaries with the mental lexicon. Dictionaries are written constructs that record words, along with their pronunciations, meanings, etymologies, and perhaps examples of use. On the one hand, they do not and cannot contain everything that a native speaker would recognize as words of her language – dictionaries have no need to record regularly inflected forms of words and words derived by very active rules of word formation. The evidence we have looked at from aphasia and genetic disorders, as well as studies using PET scans, allows us to begin to develop a picture of how these vast numbers of words are organized in our minds. Unlike dictionaries that list words alphabetically, our mental lexicon is organized as a complex web of entries that are linked in various ways, along with a system of rules for combining listed forms. It appears that entries and rules are at least to some extent wired into different parts of the brain.

Lexeme formation: the familiar

Kinds of morphemes
morphemes, the minimal meaningful units that are used to form words. Some of the morphemes can stand alone as words are called free morphemes.
The morphemes that cannot stand alone are called bound morphemes. In the examples above, the bound morphemes are un-, -ize, and -ation. Bound morphemes come in different varieties. Those are prefixes and suffixes; the former are bound morphemes that come before the base of the word, and the latter bound morphemes that come after the base. Prefixes and suffixes can be grouped together as affixes.
New lexemes that are formed with prefixes and suffixes on a base are often referred to as derived words, and the process by which they are formed as derivation.

Affixation Prefixes and suffixes usually have special requirements for the sorts of bases they can attach to. Some of these requirements concern the phonology (sounds) of their bases, and others concern the semantics (meaning) of their bases – we will return to these shortly – but the most basic requirements are often the syntactic part of speech or category of their bases. For example, the suffix -ness attaches to nouns, as the examples  part of speech or category of their bases. For example, the suffix -ness attaches to nouns, as the examples