What is Morphology?
As a meaning, morphology learns
about morphemes and words in combination with others. We can understand that
morphology discusses part of the language structure that including words and
morphemes. Before we know more about morphology, we should understand the term
first. Geert booij (2005), said that the term of morphology has been taken from
biology where it is used to donate the study of the forms of plants and
animals. Its first recorded use in writings by the German poet and writer
Goethe in 1796. It was first used for linguistics purposes in 1859 by the
German linguist August Schleicher (Salmon 2000), to refer to the study of the
forms of words. In present-day linguistics, the terms of morphology refer to
the study of the internal structure of words, and the systematic form-meaning
correspondences between words.
After we know the term of
morphology, we will understand that morphology is one of the conceptual centers
of linguistics. It is not because morphology is a dominant subdiscipline, but
it is the study of words structure, and words are at the interface between
phonology, syntax, and semantics. Words have phonological properties, they can
articulate together to form phrases and sentences, their form often reflects
their syntactic function, and their parts are often composed of meaningful
smaller pieces. It is one of the reasons why should a linguist must know all
about morphology.
What are the goals to learn morphology?
If you are a student of linguistics
department or English student department, you will realize that how meaningful
you must learn morphology. Here we will discuss the goals to learn morphology.
Why does a linguist want to do
morphology?
The first reason is the
linguist task to describe and analyze the language of the world as accurately
and as insightfully as possible. Hence, they have to deal with morphological
phenomena of a language, and therefore need a set of tools for descriptions.
The second goal of the linguist is
developing a typology of language, here the linguist will learn what are the
dimensions along which language differs, and how are these dimensions of
variation related and restricted? Do all languages have morphology, and of all
possible kind? and is there an explanation for the morphological
similarities and differences between languages?
The third, morphology is a probe
into the nature of the linguistics system, and hence into a human, natural
language.
Finally, morphology can be used to
get better insight is to how linguistic rules function in language perception
and production, and how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. Thus
morphology can give us a contribution to the wider goals of cognitive science
that explore the cognitive abilities of human beings.
What is the morpheme in morphology?
Morpheme is the smallest bit of
language that has its meaning, either a word or a part of a word. Such as the
word 'worker' contains two morphemes 'work' and 'er'. We can say also that
morpheme has a meaning as the component of words and has the smallest meaning
unit in a language. Such as the word "unfreezable", it consists of
three morphemes. We can see that it can be reduced to three identifiable units
of meaning (un-), (freeze), and (-able).
Even if we have never heard the word
“unfreezable”, it has a meaning that can be inferred from the meaning and
function of its component morphemes "freeze" is a verb which means
"to become congealed into ice by cold". The suffix (-able) changes
this verb into an adjective meaning “able to be frozen”. The prefix (un-)
negates the adjective, creating a word which means “not able to be frozen”.
Kind of Morphemes (Free vs Bound)
As we know about the understanding
of morphemes and its example above, here we can say that every word can consist
of at least one morpheme or many morphemes can be words.
The morphemes that can stand alone
as a word are called free morphemes. Its example below;
· Table
· Person
· Sad
· Hungry
· Run
· Swim
The free morphemes are usually
content, corresponding to concepts denoted by the major lexical categories of
noun, verb, and adjective.
The morpheme that can not stand
alone is called bound morphemes. Its example below;
· (un-), (pre-), (dis-), (-ment),
(-ity), (-ing), (-ed)
The bound morphemes can be content
or function morphemes.
Roots, Bases, and Stem
Not all morphemes are equally
central to the formation of a word. But we turn to our attention first about
roots. The root of a word is its most basic form. It is at the center of the
word derivation process. It also carries the basic meaning from which the rest
of the sense of the word can be derived.
Morphemes such as chair, green,
father, America, they are roots. These roots happen to be a free word or
independent words. But more often, roots are like seg in the segment,
gen in genetics, card in cardiac, sequ in sequence,
brev in brevity, these can not stand alone as a word. They are
called bound roots morphemes, as distinct from free root morphemes.
A base is anything that an affix
attaches to. Here is the example of a base, in the word unlovable, love is
the base for loveable, and loveable is the base for unlovable.
A stem is a base to which affixes
attach. It is also has a meaning as the part of a word that is left after you
take off the part which changes when forming a plural, past tense, etc. here is
the example of the stem, in the stem ‘sav-‘ you will get the word ‘saves’,
‘saved’, saving, and ‘saver’.
Affixes; Prefixes and Suffixes
Affixes carry very little of the
core meaning of the word. Mainly affixes have the effect of slightly modifying
the meaning of the stem. A stem is either a root or a root plus an affix, or
more than one root with or without affixes to which more affixes can be
attached.
All morphemes which are not roots
affixes. Robert and Donka (2001) say that tt after roots in three ways.
1. They do not form words by themselves, they have to be added
on to a stem.
2. Their meaning, in many instances is not as clear and
specific as is the meaning of roots and many of them are almost completely
meaningless.
3. Compared with the total number of roots, which is very large
(thousands or tens of thousands in any language), the number of affixes is
relatively small(a few hundred at most).
Affix is a little or a group of
letters that are added to the beginning or end of a word to make a new word.
English affix as an umbrella term for prefixes and suffixes. Only root
morphemes can free, so affixes are necessarily bound.
Subsequently, we know what is the
affix. Now, we will discuss prefixes and suffixes.
Prefixes
Prefixes are a letter or group of
letters added to the beginning of a word to make a new word. Here are some
examples of common prefixes where the meaning is clear.
· Co +
occur
“occur together”
· Mid + night
“middle of the night”
· Mis +
treat
“treat badly”
· Peri +
meter
“measure around”
· Re +
turn
“turn back”
· Un +
filled
“not filled”
Suffixes
Suffixes is a letter or group of
letters added at the end of a word to make a new word, and here are examples of
common for suffixes where the meaning is also clear.
· Act +
ion
“state of acting”
· Act +
or
“person who act”
· Act +
ive “about being
action”
· Child + ish
“like a child”
· Child +
hood
“state being a child”
· Child +
less
“without a child”
Conclusion
As we have shown above,
basically I am just saying that morphology is really important for a linguist.
It because the goals of the theories of morphology can give the linguist
illustration the understanding that the speaker possesses about morphological
structure and relatedness of the word as well as to define the type of word
formation which occurs cross-linguistically. The knowledge of a language allows
a speaker to understand and create new words composed of familiar parts.
Why should the linguist care about
morphology? This is because of the linguist’s task to describe and analyze the
language of the world as accurately and as insightfully as possible. It is
important because morphology deals with both the form and the meaning of
linguistics expressions. Hence, one might qualify morphology as word grammar
that part of the grammar that accounts for the systematic form-meaning
relations between words. In other words, it is a set of correspondence rules
between forms, and the meaning of words. The nation “word grammar” stands in
apposition to "sentence grammar", the grammar which describes the systematic
relations between form and meaning at the sentence lever.
References
Geert
Booij. (2005). The Grammar of Words; An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology.
New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Robert
Stockwell and Donka Minkova. (2001). English Words; History and Structure. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
