The study of morphology involves understanding how words are formed and structured. It is a branch of linguistics that examines the internal structure of words, focusing on how stems, roots, prefixes, and suffixes interact to create meaning and grammatical function.
The plural noun is generally formed by adding -s to the singular.
Cow (singular), cows (plural)
Boy, boys
Girl, girls
Book, books
Tree, trees
Dog, dogs
Pen, pens
Each of these independent elements is a morpheme. The definition includes "minimal" because reddens breaks down into not just redden + s, but into redd + en + s -- and no further.
cf. black+en, whit+en, short+en
redd + en
cf. talk+ing, runn+ing, sing+ing
walk + ing
cf. hand+s, cat+s, book+s
dog + s
Suffix Meaning Example
-ed past-tense verbs hopped
-ing verb form/present participle running
-ly characteristic of quickly
-s, -es more than one books, boxes
-able, -ible able to be manageable, defensible
-ful full of wishful
Prefix Meaning Example
dis- opposite defrost
in-, im-, il-, ir- not injustice impossible
re- again return
un- not unfriendly
Affixes
ni-, Af, [AGR(su):lsg]
u-, Af, [AGR(su):2sg]
a-, Af, [AGR(su):3sg]
tu-, Af, [AGR(su):lpl]
wa-, Af, [AGR(su):3pl]
na-, Af, [TNS:definite]
ta-, Af, [TNS:future]
ii. Verb roots
-lipa, V ('pay')
-penda, V ('like')
POSITION- CLASS DIAGRAMS: This method is a variation on a general approach to morphological structure that is called the ITEM AND ARRANGEMENT model. -Useful describing languages that tend to have lost morphemes.
STEP 1: Isolate the roots. As we look over the free translations of the Sierra Nahuatl data, we see that there seem to be two basic verbs invoved: one meaning "see" and another meaning "give".
-Lipstick
-Basketball
-Mailbox
-Mother-in-law
Involves combining roots to form new stems.
Compounding
example
It is another quite rare process, whereby one or more segments are omitted from a word in order to express a particular conceptual category.
Subtractive Morphology
For example:, one could say:
Singular noun + -S = Plural noun
These can be abbreviated as:
CC: Comceptual Category
SD: Structural Description (starting form)
SC: Structural Change (ending form)
The rules temselves will always have the following pathern
CC:SD--->SD
Root Number
cat 0 SG
dog -S PL
mat
tree
PROCESS RULES: a process rule is a additional schemes can be described relationship among tthe various shapes of words as though they were changes that the words undergo.
be represented in a simple position-class diagram as follows:.
In a process rule, the formation of the plural (and perhaps the singular as well) would be treated as a "process" that changes a root the appropiate INFLECTED form.
STEP 5: Label the columns. Positions in complex morphological structures tend to be associate with particular sets of conceptual categories. For example, verbs in a highly morphological language might have one position for tense, another position for ASPECT, another for PERSON and NUMBER of the SUBJECT, ect.
STEP 4: Analyze suffixes. This step will be very similar to the previous one, comparing 23g and h, we see that the difference in the forms of the suffixes is related to the difference between 'most honored sir', and ' most very honored sir'.
STEP 3: Begin to analyze prefixes. Since in this problem the first examples seem to contain just prefixes, we will start by trying to analyze the prefixes.
Usually expresses similary in meaning.
STEP 2: Estimate the affix positions. Since in the Nahuatl examples there is material to the left and the right of the roots, we suspect there arre prefixes and suffixes.
Example
ROOT
Consider the following nouns, adjectives and verbs in English:
car, book, buy, sell, eat, type, run, play, dog, cat, mouse, Ú .
the process of constructing a position-class diagram for data such as these will be given belowin step-by-step fashion though the steps are more a descriptive tool than a "PROGRAM" for analizing morphology.
_In languages that express many of their conceptual categories morphologically, there are typically several "layers" of prefixes and suffixes, as a described above.
_for example:, here are some data from sierra Natualt.
atanipenda 'he will like me'
atakupenda 'he will like you'
atampenda 'he will like him'
atatupenda 'he will like us'
atawapenda 'he will like them'
nitakupenda 'I will like you'
PROSE: written language in its ordinary form rather than poetry
Root-------No meaning on its own
Imperative-------write
Infinitive----------to write
Present participle----- writing
Past participle---------written
Perfective--------------Wrote
It is common in semitic languages, it involves superimposing a pattern of vowels, and possibly other morphological pieces, on a root that consists only of consonants.
Non- Concatenative Morphology
Examples
-English sentence: I knew Aileron when she was a child.
-Spanish translation #1 : yo conocia a Aileron cuando ella era niña .
-Spanish translation # 2: yo conoci a Aileron cuando ella era niña.
*Oh, we’re not living together- living together
*Out-of-her-mind-out-of-her-mind
*Over-the-hill-over-the-hill
Involves the repetition of part or all of a root. Plurality in Ilokano is expressed by reduplicating the first syllable of the root.
It is a change is shape that doesn't involve consonants and vowels. Rather, it consists of adjustments in features such as stress tone, and nasalization.
Involves the addition of morpheme (a prefix) to the beginning of a root.
Prefixation
Inflectional Categories
Inflectional Categories don't change word classes, and don't adjust the meanings of roots in major ways, they simply add some important information that may be required by the syntactic or situational context.
Derivational Categories
Derivational vs Inflectional categories
Sometimes the derivational category just significantly changes the meanings of the base stem.
Prototypical derivational categories create new stems. often the new stems created by a derivational category belong to a different word class than the stem that is the basis of the derivation.
Native English speakers who learn Spanish are often perplexed by the fact that Spanish has two " Past tenses". it seems at first that there are two ways to translate a sentence like the following into Spanish.
A good part of the art of human communication involves figuring out how our individual categorization scheme compares with the schemes of people we are trying to communicate