Words and morphemes

• Word


  Smallest independent unit of meaning
• Morpheme


  Smallest independent unit of meaning
• Linguistic hierarchy


  • Phonemes
  • Morphemes
  • Words
  • Phrases
  • Clauses
  • Sentences
  • Discourse
• Free morphemes


  Can stand alone as words
• Jack is (really) try-ing to run fast-er
• Types of bound morphemes


  • Affixes (prefixes, suffixes)
  • Infixes
• Morphemes


  The smallest meaningful units of language
• Inflectional morphemes


  • Minor modifications to a word's meaning
• Derivational morphemes


  • Derive a new word, either by substantially changing meaning or altering word class
• Types of morphemes


  • Bound
  • Free-standing
• Bound morphemes


  • Closed-class (Inflectional, Derivational)
  • Open-class
• Closed-class bound morphemes


  • Inflectional (Tense/Agreement/Aspect marking on verbs, Plural marking on nouns, -er and -est in comparatives)
  • Derivational (care-less, un-wind)
• Free-standing closed-class morphemes


  • Pronouns
  • Determiners
  • Prepositions
  • Auxiliary verbs
• Free-standing open-class morphemes


  • Single morpheme content words (Nouns, Verbs)
• Peeled


  He peeled the apple, or Peeled in Add the peeled apple (NB red = inflectional, green = derivational)
• Talking


  He is talking, or Talking = Talking is nice
• Manageress


  Manag-er-ess (the -ess suffix is, of course, sexist!)
• While INFLECTIONAL morphemes are often influenced by sentence structure, DERIVATIONAL morphemes are not
• INFLECTIONAL morphemes are more influenced by phonetic context than DERIVATIONAL morphemes
• While INFLECTIONAL morphemes are very productive (we can add them to most words), DERIVATIONAL morphemes are less productive
• While, in English, DERIVATIONAL morphemes can come at the beginning and ends of words (prefixes and suffixes), INFLECTIONAL morphemes can only come at the end (suffix)
• Other differences between inflectional and derivational morphemes

  • Derivational morphemes are longer
  • Derivational morphemes have more specific meanings
  • Derivational morphemes are more language-specific
• EXERCISE


  Categorising morphs
• Drilling down


  1. Syntactic context

  2. Phonetic variability

  3. Productivity

  4. Morpheme position
• Summary of differences between inflection and derivation
• Other differences between inflection and derivation
• EXERCISE


  Calculating mean length of utterance (MLU)
• Inflectional morphemes are a closed class
• Derivational morphemes are generally a closed class
• New derivational morphemes can sometimes emerge
• New derivational morpheme


  • Cottagecore