Morphology

Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.

Open class words &closed class words

Open class words---content words of a language to which we can regularly add new words, such as nound, adjectives, verbs and adverbs.

Closed class words---grammaticl or funtional words such as conjunctions, articles, prepositions and pronouns.

Morpheme---the minimal unit of meaning. Words are composed of morphemes. Words may consist of one morpheme or more morphemes.

  Affix

Prefix---morphemes that occure only before others. eg. un--, dis--, anti-, ir---

Suffix---morphemes that occure only after others.eg: --ful,  --er

Free morphemes and bound morphemes

Free morpheme--is one that may consititute a word(free form) by itself, such as bed, tree

Bound morpheme-- is one that may appear with at least one other morpheme. They can not stand by themselves, such as -s in dogs

Derivational morpheme & inflectional morpheme

Derivational morphemes--the morphemes which change the category, or grammaticl class of words, eg. modern-modernize

Inflectional morphemes--the morphemes which are for the most part purely grammatical markers, signifying such concepts as tense, number, case and so on; they never change their syntactic category, never add any lexical meaning. eg. tables, talks,John's

Allomorph 语素变体

Some morphemes have a single form in all contexts, such as dog, bark, cat, etc. In other instances, there may be some variation, that is, a morpheme may have alternate shapes or phonetic forms. They are said to be the allomorphs of the morphemes, the plural morpheme may be represented by:

 maps, dogs, mouse-mice, ox--oxen, tooth-teeth, sheep-sheep

Some other terms:root, stem&base

A root is that part of the word left when all the affixes (infectional & derivational)are removed. eg. desire in desirable

A stem is part of a word form which remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed. eg. undesirable in undesirables

A base ia any form to which affixes of any kind can be added. this means any stem and root can be termed as a base.

The differnce betweenroot, stem & base:

A base can be added by both inflectional and derivational affiexes while a stem can be added only by inflectional affixes.

A base is derivationally analyzable while a root cannot be further analyzed.

Root, stem and base can be the same form.

Morphological rules

---the rules that govern the formation of words.

Word formation----in its restricted sense, refers to the process of word variations signaling lexical relationships. it can be further sub-classified into the compositional type(compound)and the derivational type (derivation).

Compounds

Compounding--- a process of combining two or more words into one lexical unit.

 eg. cross-cultural

Noun compounds:  N+V :daybreak   V+N: playboy N+N: windmill

Verb compounds: N+V: brainwash

Adjective compounds: N+Ving:maneating  N+Ved: heatfelt N+adj.: dutyfree

Preposition compounds: P+P: into, throughout

Some points about compounds

Other ways to creat new words:

Blending(混成法): a relatively complex form of compounding, in which two words are blended by joining the initial part of the first word and the final part of the second word, or by joining the initial parts of the two words:

 eg: smog (smoke+fog)

Abbreviation：a shortened form of a word or phrase which represents the complete form. eg: TV

Clipping: a kind of abbreviation of longer words or phrases. A new word is created by :

----cutting the final part（or with a slight variation）

----cutting the initial part

-----cutting both the initial and final parts accordingly

Acronym: a word created by combning the intial letters of a number of words.eg: UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) ,SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome)

Back-formation: an abnorma; type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer already in the language. eg: televise

Borrowing: the taking over of words from other languages.

Coinage: the invention of a new word.eg: hacker