Morphology: the Words of Language

 

Every speaker of every language knows tens of thousands of words. It has been scientifically estimated that a child of six knows as many as 13,000 words. If he/she produces his/her first word at the age of two, then he/she has learned 3250 words a year and an average of 9 new words a day.

Word is an important part of linguistic knowledge and constitutes a component of our mental grammar. Without words, we cannot convey our thoughts through language. The study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed is called morphology. The term ‘morphology’ is Greek, and it is constituted of two morphemes,

morph+ology; ‘morph’ stands for shape or form, and ‘ology’ stands for the study of something. In linguistics, morphology is a level of linguistic analysis and discussion that covers the scientific study of the forms and structure of words in a language. The term was first introduced in 1859 by the German linguist August Schleicher. Presently, morphology forms a core part of linguistics, or the fundamental level of the linguistic analysis of language.

Morphology is the identification of morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful and independent grammatical unit of a language that cannot be divided without altering or destroying its meaning. For example, ‘sing’ is a morpheme; but if we remove ‘g’ or ‘s’, it changes to ‘sin’ or ‘ing’, which have their own quite different meanings, and if we remove ‘si’ or the like, sing’ loses its meaning. To know a language, it is inevitable to know its morphology. Like most linguistic knowledge, it is generally unconscious knowledge.

A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes:

One morpheme                       boy, desire

Two morphemes                      boy+ish, desire+able

Three morphemes                   boy+ish+ness, desire+able+ ity, un+conscious+ness

Four morphemes                      gentle+man+li+ness, un+desire+able+ity

More than four                                   un+ gentle+man+li+ness,

 

A morpheme may be represented by a single sound, or by a single syllable, such as child . A morpheme may also consist of more than one syllable: two syllables, as in lady, water; or three syllables, as in pneumonia or crocodile; or four or more syllables, as in salamander, orthopedical, etc.

A morpheme, the minimal linguistic sign, is thus a grammatical unit in which there is an arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning that cannot be further analyzed. This may be too simple a definition, but it will serve our purpose for now. Every word in every language is composed of one or more morphemes.

 In 1933, Leonard Bloomfield, a prominent American linguist, presented a precise definition of the morpheme as a linguistic form. His definition is foundational in the study of morphology, the branch of linguistics that deals with the structure of words. According to him,

In English, the sounds of the letters bear and bare represent four homonyms (also called homophones), different words with the same sounds, as shown in the sentences:

She can't bear(tolerate) children.

She can’t bear (give birth to) children.

Bruin Bear is the mascot of UCLA.

She stood there, bare and beautiful.

Though they have the same meaning, couch and sofa are two words because they are represented by two different strings of sounds.

Free Morpheme and Bound Morpheme:

Morphemes are classified into two types-free morphemes and bound morphemes. A free morpheme can stand alone as a complete word and still have meaning. For example: bag, book, goat, dog, is, and, but, beauty, cruelty, and so on.

Free morphemes are of two types- lexical or referential morphemes and functional or grammatical morphemes.

Lexical morphemes: lexical or referential morphemes carry the main meaning. These are very large in number and independently meaningful morphemes. They include nouns (such as tree, people, rice, length, dog), adjectives (such as kind, cruel, tall, short, wide), main verb (go, read, try, run), and adverbs (quickly, happily, shortly), etc.

Functional or grammatical morphemes: The grammatical morphemes are very limited in number and can also be used independently. They have little or no meaning on their own but demonstrate grammatical relationships in and between sentences. They usually include auxiliary verbs (for example, a, the, much, little, each, etc.), prepositions (in, to, into, up, below, etc.), and conjunctions (and, but, or, yet,etc.).

Bound morphemes: Bound morphemes do not stand alone. It must be attached to a free morpheme to convey meaning. For example, some morphemes like boy, desire, gentle, and man constitute words by themselves. On the other hand, the morphemes like -hood, -ish, -ness, -ly, dis, un – are never words but always parts of words. These occur only before other morphemes. These morphemes are called prefixes or suffixes. These prefix and suffix morphemes are called bound morphemes because they cannot occur unattached, as distinct from free morphemes like man, child, sick, brave, allow, and so on.

There are two types of bound morphemes_ Inflectional morphemes and Derivational morphemes.

Inflectional Morpheme: An inflectional morpheme serves a purely grammatical function, such as referring to and giving extra-linguistic information about already existing meaning of a word, for example, number, person, gender, tense, case, etc. in English, there are only eight inflections- third person singular marker or verbs in present tense, as in speaks, teaches: regular plural marker, as in books, papers, mangoes; possessive marker ‘s/s’ as in James’s office; regular past tense marker, as in helped, borrowed, drew, played; past participle marker -en, as in driven, given, written; present participle marker -ing, as in driving, reading, giving, studying; comparative marker -er, as in faster, happier; and superlative marker -est, as in fastest, happiest, slowest, etc.

Derivational morpheme: Derivational morphemes are the morphemes that create new words, usually by either changing the meaning and /or the word category, or both. It can be divided into two classes: class maintaining morphemes and class changing morphemes. Class maintaining derivational morphemes stands for those suffixes that generate a derived form of the same class, such as -hood in boyhood and ship in scholarship. On the contrary, the class-changing derivational morphemes refer to those morphemes that produce a derived form of another class, such as -er in teacher, -ish in childish, or -al in national, etc.