Introduction to

the English
Language
System

MORPHOLOGY
WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY?
- In linguistics, morphology (/mɔːrˈfɒlədʒi/ mor-FOL-ə-jee) is the study of words,
how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.
- It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words,
prefixes, and suffixes.
- looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a
word's pronunciation and meaning.
- differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages
based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how
they make up a language's vocabulary.
 Introduction to the English Language System: 3
Morphology

MORPHEME
-The smallest unit of a word
with meaning

There are two types of

morphology: The inflection
and derivation
INFLECTION
- the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the
addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person,
number, gender, mood, voice, and case. English inflection
indicates noun plural (cat, cats), noun case (girl, girl’s, girls’),
third person singular present tense (I, you, we, they buy; he
buys), past tense (we walk, we walked), aspect (I have called, I
am calling), and comparatives (big, bigger, biggest).
Introduction to the English Language System:
5
Morphology

DERIVATION
-in descriptive linguistics and
traditional grammar, the
formation of a word by
changing the form of the base
or by adding affixes to it (e.g.,
“hope” to “hopeful”).
 Introduction to the English Language System: Morphology 6

The term morphology is Greek and is a

makeup of morph- meaning ‘shape, form’, and
-ology which means ‘the study of something’.
What is a word?
Morphology as a sub-discipline of linguistics Smallest independent units of
language
was named for the first time in 1859 by the
German linguist August Schleicher who used Independent:
the term for the study of the form of words.
• do not depend on other words.
• can be separated from other units
• can change position.
 Introduction to the English Language System: Morphology
7

SIMPLE WORDS: Don’t have internal structure (only consist of one morpheme) e.g.,
work, build, run. They can’t be split into smaller parts which carry meaning or function.
COMPLEX WORDS: Have internal structure (consist of two or more morphemes)
e.g., worker: affix -er added to the root work to form a noun.
Morphemes are the smallest meaning-bearing units of language.
FREE VS BOUND MORPHEMES
Free morpheme: a simple word, consisting of one morpheme e.g., house, work, high,
chair, wrap. They are words in themselves.
Bound morpheme: morphemes that must be attached to another morpheme to
receive meaning.
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WORD FORMATION
PROCESS
- how new words are being formed in
the language
- methods in which words are formed
by deploying different types of
rules.
Introduction to English Language System: Morphology 9

BACK FORMATION
is a word-formation
process that eliminates
the actual derivational
affix from the main form
to create a new word.
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CONVERSION
a word of one grammatical form converts
into another grammatical form without
changing any spelling or pronunciation.

Noun To verb Verb To noun

Access - To access To hope Hope

Google - To google To cover Cover

Email - To email To attack Attack

COMPOUNDING 11

- a word-formation process that allows words to

combine to make a new word.
- Compounding words can also be formed as two
words joined with a hyphen

Words Compounding words

Class+room Classroom
Note+book Notebook
Break+up Breakup
Introduction to English Language System: Morphology 12

CLIPPING
- reduces or shortens a word without changing the exact meaning.

Clipping is divided into four types. They are:

1. Back Clipping – removes the end part of a word
2. Fore Clipping – removes the beginning part of a word
3. Middle Clipping – reserves the middle position
4. Complex Clipping – removes multiple pieces from multiple
words
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Words Clippings
Advertisement Ad
Telephone Phone
Influenza Flue
Cable telegram Cablegram
Intro to English Language System: Morphology 14

BLENDING
- the parts of two or more words combine to form a new word.

Words Blendings

Breakfast+lunch Brunch

Information+commercial Infomercial

Sports+broadcast Sportscast
ABBREVIATION 15

- is another famous and widely used word-formation

method used to shorten a word or phrase

Words/Phrases Abbreviation

Doctor Dr.

Junior Jr.

Department Dept.
Introduction to English Language System: Morphology 16

ACRONYM
- is a popular word-formation process in which
an initialism is pronounced as a word.
- It forms from the first letter of each word in a
phrase, and the newly formed letters create a
new word that helps us speed communication.
 17

Acronyms Words/Phrases

ASAP As Soon As Possible

NASA National Aeronautics and

Space Administration

HIV Human
Immunoefficiency Virus
Introduction to English Language System: Morphology 18

BORROWING
- is another word-formation process in which a word from
one language is borrowed directly into another language
Words Borrowed from

Pizza Italian

Murder French

Cherub Hebrew
Introduction to the English Language System: Morphology 19

APPROACHES
1.Morpheme-based morphology
word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A
morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language.
In a word such as independently, the morphemes are said to be in-,
depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are,
in this case, derivational affixes
Introduction to the English Language System: Morphology 20

Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic

axioms:
Baudoin’s "single morpheme" hypothesis: Roots and affixes have the same
status as morphemes.
Bloomfield’s "sign base" morpheme hypothesis: As morphemes, they are
dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.
Bloomfield’s "lexical morpheme" hypothesis: morphemes, affixes and
roots alike are stored in the lexicon.
Introduction to the English Language System: Morphology 21

Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian

and one Hockettian.

The Bloomfieldian tradition:

For Bloomfield, the "morpheme" was the minimal form with meaning, but it
was not meaning itself.

The Hockettian tradition:

For Hockett, morphemes are "meaning elements", not "form elements". For him,
there is a "morpheme plural", with the "allomorphs" "-s, -en, -ren" etc.
Introduction to the English Language System: Morphology 22

2.Lexeme-based morphology
usually takes what is called an item-and-process approach. Instead of
analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word
form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem
in order to produce a new one.
For example, in English, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same
lexeme, which can be represented as RUN.
 Introduction to the English Language System: Morphology 23

3. Word-based morphology
is (usually) a word-and-paradigm approach. The theory takes paradigms as a central
notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms or to generate
word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold
between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is
that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches.
The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a
word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme,
corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third-person
plural".
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