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ENGLISH

MORPHOLOGY
A Lecture Note

Asep Suparman
Draft 7/2/2015
STKIP Garut

English Morphology

Penapian/Disclaimer
Tulisan ini merupakan catatan kuliah bersama mahasiswa semester empat
Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, STKIP Garut. Tulisan masih bersifat draf
kasar. Catatan ini boleh diperbanyak dan disebarkan, namun tidak untuk
diperjualbelikan.

English Morphology

Table of contents

English determine where in the sentence the word book may take place. It
can be used as a subject as in books are expensive these days or an object
(of a verb or a preposition) as in she loves books. Now, lets conduct a
syntactic test. Is water a word? Syntactically, the word water may occur in
an object position as in humans need water. Now water follows the rules for
nouns, it is a noun, hence a word, and the same test can be applied to the
other syntactic categories (adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc.) whether certain
items in a sentence is a word. Defining what a word is on the basis of
syntactic criteria seems to be helpful; however, should everything in a
sentence that follows the rules for nouns be a noun and hence called a word?
How about what you want in I know what you want? What you want takes
an object position, and therefore follows the rules for nouns. However, they
are more than a word.

What is a word?
BERSAMBUNG. SARE HEULA EMANGNA!!! SEMANGAT!!!

Table of contents
Penapian/Disclaimer.....................................................................................i
Table of contents .........................................................................................ii
What is morphology? .................................................................................. 1
1. 1. Introduction........................................................................... 1
1. 2. The nature of word................................................................ 1

ii

English Morphology

What is morphology?

Chapter I
Keywords: simplex word, complex word, morpheme, word type, word token, lexeme,
derivation, inflection

What is morphology?
1. 1.

Introduction

The term morphology is derived from morph- (Greek: morph, meaning


shape or form) and ology (Greek: lgos, meaning the study of
something). In linguistics, morphology refers to the study of word
formation. It deals with internal structure of words, how word forms are
varied in how they are used in sentences, and how new words are coined.
Take a look at the following Indonesian word forms:

Lempar melempar melemparkan melempari

Rasa merasa merasakan *merasai

Jiwa *menjiwa - *menjiwakan menjiwai

As a native speaker of Indonesian, you know that you can form me-lempar
and me-rasa from lempar and rasa respectively, and at the same time you
also notice that it is not possible for you to form me-rasa-i as it is with melempar-i; you know that me(n)-jiwa and me(n)-jiwa-kan sound not quite
right even though they have the same form as me-rasa and me-rasa-kan.
You have the ability to form words or to make judgments that certain word
forms cannot possibly exist in Indonesian even if you cannot articulate the
rules. You are able to produce and understand certain forms of words in
Indonesian because you have intuitive knowledge of word formation
principles in your own language even though you never studied Indonesian
morphology. Unfortunately, as beginning EFL students who are not very
well exposed to English, we dont have such knowledge (yet) in English.
This can be a reason (of course not the only one) why we need to study
English morphology.
1. 2.

The nature of word

Lets begin with answering a very basic question about the nature of word.

What is a word?

Chances are that the answer to this question is something like a string of
letters that is proceeded by a blank space and followed by either another
blank space or a punctuation mark. It might look a good definition in the
first place. In the question what is a word? above we count four
(orthographic) words that are composed of four uninterrupted strings of
letters: all of which are proceeded by blank spaces, three of which are
followed by blank spaces, and one of which is followed by a question mark
as illustrated below.

What is a word?
However, this orthographic approach to define what a word is could be a
real annoyance as certain words may come with different spelling variants.
For example, some people may write posttest (in a closed form), and others
write post-test (in a hyphenated form). Will you count post-test one or two
words? If you count the hyphen as a punctuation mark, post-test constitutes
two words, and if not, it is one word. How about key word and keyword?
Furthermore, when it comes to spoken language, we cannot hear these
blank spaces. Some may argue that pauses can delineate words in spoken
language as blank spaces do in written language; however, do we normally
speak like [], where each word is pronounced in
isolation? Possibly not. Rather we usually speak like [], and
we have just two words in this case, not four. To make the case even worse,
some speakers sometimes make pauses between syllables. Thus, defining
what words are on the basis of phonological aspects could lead to other
problems.
Now lets take another detour. Semantically, a word expresses a unified
concept. For example, book represents a written work or composition that
has been published, printed on pages bound together. However, some
concepts are not lexicalized in one word, rather they are expressed by many.
For example, the book I read yesterday refers to a particular book and hence
is considered a unified concept, but is expressed by more than one word.
Where are we now? Right. We cannot define what a word is
orthographically, phonologically, and semantically. How about defining a
word syntactically? Lets see!
Words are usually categorized into such syntactic classes as nouns,
verbs, adverbs, adjectives, etc., which are called word classes, part of
speech, or syntactic categories. Each of these is syntactically rule-bound
when used in a sentence. For example, book is a noun. Syntactic rules of

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