LINGUISTICS MODULES

• Morpheme


  The smallest units of language that have a meaning or a grammatical function and form words or parts of words
• Types of Morphemes


  • Free morphemes
  • Bound morphemes
• Free or independent morphemes


  Morphemes which can occur alone as words and have a meaning or fulfill a grammatical function
• Types of free morphemes

  • Lexical (content or referential) morphemes
  • Function(al) or grammatical morphemes
• Lexical (content or referential) morphemes


  Free morphemes that have semantic content (or meaning) and usually refer to a thing, quality, state or action
• Function(al) or grammatical morphemes

  Free morphemes which have little or no meaning on their own, but which show grammatical relationships in and between sentences
• Bound (or dependent) morphemes


  Morphemes which never occur alone as words but as parts of words; they must be attached to another morpheme (usually a free morpheme) in order to have a distinct meaning
• Types of bound morphemes

  • Bound roots
  • Affixes
• Bound roots


  Bound morphemes which have lexical meaning when they are attached to other bound morphemes to form content words
• Affixes


  Bound morphemes which are usually marginally attached to words and which change the meaning or function of those words
• Types of Affixes


  • Prefixes
  • Infixes
  • Suffixes
• Prefixes


  Bound morphemes that are added to the beginning of the word
• Infixes


  Bound morphemes that are inserted within the words
• Suffixes


  Bound morphemes which are attached to the end of the word
• Types of Affixes by function


  • Derivational affixes
  • Inflectional affixes
• Derivational affixes


  Morphemes that create (or derive) new words, usually by either changing the meaning and/or the part of speech (i.e., the syntactic category), or both, of the words they are attached to
• Inflectional affixes


  Morphemes which serve a purely grammatical function, such as referring to and giving extra linguistic information about the already existing meaning of a word (e.g., number, person, gender, case, etc.), expressing syntactic relations between words (e.g. possession, comparison), among others
• Roots (or bases)


  The morphemes (free or bound) that carry the principal or basic concept, idea or meaning in a word
• Stems


  Free roots to which derivational affixes have been added or are likely to be added
• General Morphological Processes Involved in the Formation of New Words

  • Affixation
  • Compounding
  • Symbolism
  • Reduplication
  • Suppletion
• Affixation


  Adding derivational affixes (i.e., prefixes, infixes and suffixes) to roots and stems to form new words
• Compounding


  The combination of two or more (usually free) roots to form a new word
• Compound words have the following characteristics:
• Compound word


  A word made up of the roots (at the same time words themselves) of two or more words
• Compound words in English

  • Behave grammatically and semantically as single words
  • Between their component elements no affixes (whether inflections or derivations) can usually occur; inflectional suffixes can appear only after compound words
  • Can be written in three different ways: open (with a space), hyphenated, or solid
• The global meaning of a compound word can often be guessed from the individual meaning of each element of the compound, but there are some compound words whose global meanings have to be learned as if they were single words
• Compound words


  Usually have the primary stress on the first element of the compound
• Compound words


  • The second element (or head word) usually determines the grammatical category to which the whole compound belongs
  • Some compound words are made up of a bound root and a free root, or two bound roots
• Compounding is a recursive process; one compound itself may become a constituent of a larger compound
• Symbolism (or morpheme internal change)


  Altering the internal phonemic structure of a morpheme to indicate grammatical functions
• Symbolism in English

  • Forming plurals by replacing the phoneme \u…\ with \i…\ (e.g. goose/geese, tooth/teeth)
  • Indicating past tense and past participle forms by undergoing internal changes (e.g. sing/sang/sung, swim/swam/swum)
• Reduplication


  The repetition of all or part of a root or stem to form new words
• Types of reduplication


  • Complete (or total) reduplication - repeating the entire root or stem
  • Partial reduplication - repeating only part of the root or stem
• Reduplication in other languages


  • Total reduplication in Indonesian, Tojolabal, Hausa, Hawaiian
  • Partial reduplication in Snohomish and Tagalog
• Reduplication in English


  • Total reduplication: bye-bye, goody-goody
  • Partial reduplication: walkie-talkie, criss-cross
• Common uses of reduplicatives in English


  • Imitating sounds
  • Suggesting alternating movements
  • Disparaging by suggesting instability, nonsense, insincerity, vacillation
  • Intensifying
• Suppletion


  A complete change in the form of a root (word) or the replacement of one root by another morphologically unrelated root with the same component of meaning in different grammatical contexts
• Suppletion in English


  • good/better/best, bad/worse/worst, be/am/are/is, go/went
• Acronymy


  The process of forming a new word from the initial letters of the constituent words of a phrase or sentence
• Acronyms in English


  • NATO, UFO, IOU, snafu