ENGLISH

MORPHOLOGY
PRESENTED BY:
SHARMEEN PARANTHAMAN
EESVARI THRUVARASU
WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY?

Morphology is the field of

linguistics that studies the
internal structure of words
and how they are formed.
 WHAT ARE WORDS?
Free-standing units that represent a meaning.

Can be combined with other words to form phrases and sentences.

Morphemes are the smallest unit of words that carry the

fundamental meanings of a language.
 WHAT ARE
MORPHEMES?
It is a word or a part of a word that has
meaning.

It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful

segments without changing its meaning or leaving a
meaningless remainder.

It has relatively the same stable meaning in different

verbal environments.
 TYPES OF MORPHEMES

Derivational morpheme

Inflectional morpheme

Free, Bound, Base root

DERIVATIONAL MORPHEME

Changes the part of speech or meaning of a

word.

Not required by syntax.

Usually not very productive and are generally selective

about what they will combine with.
EXAMPLES OF DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES
 INFLECTIONAL MORPHEME

• Do not change the meaning or part of speech.

• Required by the syntax.

• Combination of affixes with roots.

• Occur at the margin of a word, after any derivational

morphemes.
EXAMPLES OF INFLECTIONAL MORPHEME
 FREE, BOUND, BASE ROOT
Free morphemes are units of meaning which can stand alone as an
independent word or alongside another free or bound morpheme.

A bound morpheme is a unit of meaning which can only exist

alongside a free morpheme.

A base is any part of a word that you can add inflections to,
or that you can add prefixes/suffixes that change the
meaning/part of speech while a root is a (usually free)
morpheme around which words can be built up by adding
affixes.
FREE MORPHEMES VS BOUND MORPHEMES
BASE ROOT
 CATEGORIES OF MORPHEMES

 FUNCTION MORPHEME

 CONTENT MORPHEME

 ALLOMORPHS
 FUNCTION MORPHEME
• It is a free morpheme.

• Function morpheme are dependent on the context

and other morpheme to create a clear meaning.

• Function morpheme encodes a grammatical meaning

as it modifies the meaning and does not have
meaning on its own.

• They make up word classes such as preposition,

conjunction, pronoun.
e.g. : as, but, to, with

• New words are barely made into functional

morphemes (closed class).
 CONTENT MORPHEME
A type of free morpheme.

Have lexical denotations that are not dependent on the

context or on other morphemes.

They make up most major word classes, nouns,

adjective and verbs.

They usually comprise of simple words and compound words.

- girl, kettle (one free morpheme)
- sunflower, handbag (two free morphemes)
 ALLOMORPHS
 A single morpheme with different variations in terms of spelling and pronunciation.

 The plural morpheme usually written as "-s" can be divided into three different allomorph.
E.g. :
/s/ - hats
/z/ - mugs

 Allomorphs of that show negative connotation vary in spelling but all carry the same meaning.
E.g. :
un - fortunate, tenable
de - throne, classify
ir - relevant, regular
WORD FORMATION PROCESSES
Derivation

Coinage

Conversion

Borrowing

Back-formation
Compounding

Blending

Clipping

Abbreviation

Acronyms
Onomatopoeia

Suppletion

Reduplication

Morpheme – internal changes (ablaut)

THANK YOU 