LIN203H1 Lecture 3: lec3.pdf
Document Summary
At base, the relationship of a word"s form and meaning is arbitrary . But many words do have internal structure that meaning can be derived from! Dog is a simplex word that has no such internal structure; but the plural dogs does: dog, which contributes the main meaning (the type of animal), -s, which makes the word plural. These components are called morphs. and how they combine to form words. So the meaning of dog can be derived systematically from smaller components. Morphology is the study of these structural units, The morph is the smallest unit of word structure: Thus the morpheme phil-, meaning liking", appears as the morph phil- in philanthropy, but as the slightly different morph -phile in anglophile. We"ll talk more about how different morphs of the same morpheme relate to each other over the next few classes.
