MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX

Defining Morphology
Morphology: Morphology: is the study of forms. 1. Biology: it is the study of the form and structure of animals and plants. Morphology: is The branch of linguistics and one of the major components of grammar that studies word structures, especially in terms of morphemes. Adjective: morphological.

Defining Morphology

Also we can define Morphology as the study and description of the internal construction of words, i.e.: how the words are formed in language. OR Morphology: is the study and description of word formation (as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language OR Morphology: is the study of word formation, of the structure of words.

Morphemes
Languages vary widely in the degree to which words can be analyzed into: words, elements, or morphemes. What is a morpheme? What is the difference between morpheme and a word? Morpheme: is the smallest grammatical unit of speech that cannot be divided into smaller parts. It may be a word like place or an article like an or elements of the word like re- -ed etc...

Morphemes
So, the morpheme is a meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. In English, words like talks, talker, talked, talking must consist of one element talk and a number of other elements such as -s, -er, -ed and ing.

Examples:
re-open-ed, has 3 morphemes (minimal unit of meaning - minimal unit of meaning-minimal unit of grammatical function(indicate past tense) tour-ist-s (minimal unit of meaning tour-minimal unit of meaning(ist),marking "person who does sth."minimal unit of grammatical function(-s)(indicate plural).

Allomorphs
There are variants of morphemes called allomorphs the ending -s as in cats dogs or the -es as in dishes; the -ed as in asked, or the -ed in wanted are all allomorphs of the plural morphemes. So, we can define allomorphs: is the different forms that a morpheme may take in different contexts or words; i.e. the phonetic realization of morphemes.

Morpheme Vs. Word

Morpheme is not identical to words. There is a principle difference between a morpheme and a word. A morpheme may or may not stand alone; whereas a word is freestanding. Every word comprises one or more morphemes. e.g. looked: there two morphemes: look , & -ed Look is a word and can stand alone, but ed is a suffix and cant stand alone.

Types of Morphemes

There are two types of morphemes:

Types of Morphemes
Bound Morphemes

Morphemes: that cannot stand normally alone as meaningful word and are typically attached to another form or word. (e.g., ed, -s, -ing, un-, -er, -less) Unhappy, teacher, careless, talked, teaching

Morphemes that can stand by themselves as a single meaningful words of a language. They Free Morphemes can be lexical morphemes : look, press, or grammatical functional morphemes as: at, and, in etc...

Bound Morphemes
Bound Morphemes: they appear only as parts of words always in conjunctions with a root (stem). Most Bound Morphemes in English are Affixes:

Affixes: are Morphemes that are attached to a word (stem) to form new words.

Affixes
Affixes can be:

Derivational: Prefixes and Suffixes

Inflectional: Grammatical aspects

Derivational

(A)Derivational morphemes: are those bound morphemes (Prefixes & suffiexes) that we use in making new words or making words of a different grammatical category from the stem. i.e. the meaning of the word or the part of speech of the word. e.g. good(adj.)+-ness(derivational morpheme) =goodness(noun), care(noun)+-ful=careful(adj.) A list of derivational morphemes concludes; suffixes:-ish, -less, ly etc. prefixes: re-,pre-, un-, ex-, mis-, co- etc... Important: unimportant , child: childish, etc...

Inflectional

Are those morphemes that are used to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Girl+(-s) = gilrs plural Clean+(-ed) = cleaned tenses inflectional morphemes are also called(inflections).

English language has eight inflectional morphemes 1. -'s (possessive) with nouns 2. -s (plural) 3. -ing (present participle) 4. -s (3rd person singular) with verbs 5. -ed(past tense) *played 6. -en(past participle)forgotten 7. -est (superlative) with adjectives 8. -er (comparative) *Jane's brother * pens *teaching *she likes

*happiest *happier

What's the difference between inflectional morpheme and derivational morpheme?

*inflectional morpheme, never change the grammatical category of a word. -Old (adj.) Older (adj.)

while derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word . -teach (v.) teacher (n.)

Types of free morphemes

There are two types of free morphemes: 1. 2.

Lexical Morphemes

Functional Morphemes

Lexical Morphemes
Are morphemes that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that carry the). In other words: A word that conveys information in a text or speech act is known as a lexical word. **They are treated as an "open" class of words because we can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily. i.e. we can create new words which are lexical.

Functional Morphemes
Functional morphemes are: (grammatical)morphemes that consist of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. e.g. and, in, the, that, it, she ...etc. ** They are called "close" class of words because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language.