Morphology

 Morphology is the study of the organization of phonemes into meaningful groups called morphs and the organization of the morphs into morphemes. Morphemes are the meaningful morphological unit of language that cannot be further divided. 

Any of the distinctive units of sound that distinguish one word from another is a phoneme. 

eg: p,b,t in pat, bat, tap

A morph is the smallest meaningful unit, it is a combination of sounds that carries a single indivisible meaning regardless of whether it stands alone or not.

eg: books - |buks| has 4 phonemes

|b| |u| |k| & |s| and 2 morphemes 'book' 's'

A morpheme is a meaningful morphological unit of language that cannot be further divided. A morpheme cannot be cut into smaller syntactic segments.

An allomorph is a non distinctive variant of a morpheme an alternative term for an allomorph is morpheme alternant. In English the plural ending 's' has the following variants.

eg: plural morpheme [s] as in |kæts|, [z] as in |dogz| [iz] as in |bʌziz|

These are the different allomorphs of the English plural morpheme 's'. The plural endings can also be [in] as in |ɔksin| or a vowel change as in [mæn-men] or zero modification as in sheep, deer etc.

thus we say that plural morpheme or meaningful unit has six allomorphs or variant forms [s], [z], [iz], [in], vowel change and zero modification. for the regular form the rule is as follows:

1. [s] occurs after voiceless consonants except sibilants 's', 'z' and affricates 'tʃ' and 'dʒ'

eg: cats, caps,desks

2. [z] occurs after voiced consonants except sibilants and affricates

eg: dogs, bags

3. [iz] occurs after sibilants affricates.

eg: glasses, horses, churches, judges

Types of Morphemes

Morphemes which occur freely on its own or which can occur by themselves independently as whole words are known as free morphemes. eg: man, cat, dog, boy, book etc.

Those morphemes such as anti-, ed-, -ly, which must be attached to another are called bound morpheme. Bound morphemes are of two main types. For eg: "The owl looked up at the cloudy sky." Superficially both 'looked' and 'cloudy' have a similar make up consisting of one free morpheme followed by a bound one. Yet the bound morphemes differ in nature; 'ed' at the end of looked is an inflectional morpheme, since it provides further information about an existing lexical item 'look'. Other examples of inflectional morphemes are the plural forms as in dogs, owls etc. However, 'y' in the end of 'cloudy' behave differently. It is a derivational morpheme, one which creates an entirely new word- hence derivational. Few other examplse of derivational morphemes are 'ness' as in happiness, goodness. kindness etc. 'ish.' as in greenish, brownish etc. 'ment' as in establishment, entertainment etc.

Derivational endings create an entirely new word. Inflectional endings can be added on to to derivational ones.

eg: establish- free morpheme

establishment - derivational

establishments - inflectional

There can also be class maintaining derivational endings and class changing derivational endings. child- childhood, king- kinship, knight- knighthood are examples of class maintaining derivational ending. 

Class changing derivational ending

happy (adjective)- happiness (noun) play (verb)- player (noun), act (verb) actor ( noun)

Such additional morphemes bound to a word is known as Affixes. There are three types of affixes. Prefix is that which precedes the word (dislike, unnecessary, immortal) Suffix, is that which succeeds a word. they are further divided into inflectional and derivational. Derivational is further divided into class changing and class maintaining derivational. Infix is yet another type of affix which is barely used in English.

Prepared by

Dr. Susan Mathew