9882 Lecture 3: Week 3 lecture - 9882
20 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Week 3 lecture (morphology) – Linguistics for
Educators 9882
Monday, 26 February 2018
Morphology: The study of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are
formed.
Morph = bringing words together.
Knowing a word means knowing its sound (pronunciation), knowing its spelling
(orthography)
Knowing its grammatical category or syntactic class
Content words (open-class words; we can create new words using these words): include: nouns,
verbs, adjectives, adverbs
*Verbs describe an action, state or occurrence.
*Adverb is a word or phrase that modifies the meaning of a Verb, adjective or adverb: Expresses
manner, place, time, or degree.
*Adjective is used when naming an attribute of a noun.
Function words (closed-class words; cannot create any new words): specify grammatical relation
and have little or no semantic content, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles (the word an,
a, the). Function words are the words that form the basis of a sentence e.g. he went to the market,
she is pretty.
Morpheme: is the smallest meaningful unit of a word e.g. dog, cat, child, person, . Cannot be further
analysed.
For example; A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes.
One morpheme: boy
Two morphemes: boy + ish
Three morphemes: boy + ish + ness
Four morphemes: gentle + man + li + ness
More than four: un + gentle + man + li + ness
The discreteness of morphemes: the decomposition of words into morphemes illustrates one of the
fundamental properties of human language - discreteness.
Sound units combine to form morphemes
Morphemes combine to for words
PREFIXES AND SUFFIXES MUST RELATE TO THE WORD eg. [Un]palatable works but [Un]pala[table]
does not.
Prefixes: adding a morpheme to the beginning of the word, e.g. unhappy, prejudge.
Suffixes: follow other morphemes at the end of the word: -ing, -er, -ist, -ly,
Infixes: inserted into the other morphemes
Circumfixes: little bit added to beginning and end of morphemes.
[Be]friend[ed] [ ] = prefix or suffix
[Retro]act[ive]
[Tele]vise
Margin
[En]dear[ment]
Document Summary
Morphology: the study of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed. Knowing a word means knowing its sound (pronunciation), knowing its spelling (orthography) Knowing its grammatical category or syntactic class. Content words (open-class words; we can create new words using these words): include: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. *adverb is a word or phrase that modifies the meaning of a verb, adjective or adverb: expresses manner, place, time, or degree. *adjective is used when naming an attribute of a noun. Function words (closed-class words; cannot create any new words): specify grammatical relation and have little or no semantic content, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles (the word an, a, the). Function words are the words that form the basis of a sentence e. g. he went to the market, she is pretty. Morpheme: is the smallest meaningful unit of a word e. g. dog, cat, child, person, .
