Introduction to Morphology; etymology,processes of word formation,and morphemes.

Introduction:

Morphology comes from a Greek word meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form’ and is used in linguistics to denote the study of words, both with regard to their internal structure and their combination or formation to form new or larger units. In order to study morphology it is necessary to introduce etymology and some of the word formation processes.

I. Etymology:

Etymology is the study of the origin and history of a word. It is a term which, like many of our technical words, comes to us through Latin, but has its origins in Greek (e´tymon “original form” + logia “study of”). By having a close look at the etymologies of less technical words, we discover that there are different ways in which new words can enter the language. We should keep in mind that these processes have been at work in the language for some time and a lot of words in daily use today were, at one time, considered barbaric misuses of the language (Yulu, 2010).

II. Processes of word formation:

a. Coinage

One of the least common processes of word formation in English is coinage, that is, the invention of totally new terms. The most typical sources are invented trade names for commercial products that become general terms (usually without capital letters) for any version of that product. Older examples are aspirin, nylon, and vaseline (Yulu, 2010).

The most salient contemporary example of coinage is the word google. Originally a misspelling for the word googol (= the number 1 followed by 100 zeros), in the creation of the word Googleplex, which later became the name of a company (Google), the term google (without a capital letter) has become a widely used expression meaning “to use the internet to find information.” (Yulu, 2010).

b. Borrowing

It is a further way of expanding the lexicon. One of the most common sources of new words in English is the process simply labeled borrowing. Borrowing is the act of taking words from other languages and making them as a part of the lexicon (vocabulary) of the borrowing language.

In one hand, the English language has adopted a vast number of words from other languages, including “croissant” from the French, “dope” from Dutch, “piano” from Italian, “sofa” from Arabic, and “yogurt” from Turkish. In the other hand, the other languages borrow words from English as well. For instance, the word “stress” and “weekend” are english words that were taken to be used in French language (Yulu,2010).

i. Loan-translation or calque

 Loan-translation or calque is a special type of borrowing. In this process, there is a direct translation of the elements of a word into the borrowing language. Interesting examples is the French term gratte-ciel, which literally translates as “scrape-sky,”.  Gratte-ciel is a calque of the English word skyscraper. Another example of a calque is the English expression moment of truth is believed to be a calque from the Spanish phrase el momento de la verdad (Yulu,2010).

c. Compounding:

Compounding is a word-forming process which means bringing together two roots or two lexemes to produce a new lexeme, called a compound, as in fingerprint, textbook, and wallpaper. All the aformentioned examples are nouns, but we can also create compound adjectives as in good-looking, low-paid, and compounds of adjective “fast” plus noun “food” as in a fast-food restaurant or a full-time job.

d. Blending:

Blending is the combination of two separate forms to produce a single new term. It is putting together lexemes but at least one of these lexemes is present only in a fragmentary form, as in e.g. fog + smoke = smog, television+broadcast = telecast , and in breakfast + lunch = brunch, etc. The lexemes so produced are blends (Varga, 2010).

e. Clipping:

Clipping means shortening a lexeme and thus producing a more informal variant, e.g. photograph → photo, influenza → flu, examination → exam, etc (Varga, 2010).

There are a number of sub-types of clipping: fore-clipping, back-clipping (which is most common) and lexemes which have been both fore- and back-clipped. Clipping can be better understood through the follwing examples:

• phone = fore-clipping of telephone.
• bro = back-clipping to form a more informal version of brother.
• fridge = fore- and back-clipping of refrigerator.

f. Backformation:

A very specialized type of reduction process is known as backformation. Typically, a word of one type (usually a noun) is reduced to form a word of another type (usually a verb). A good example of backformation is the process whereby the noun “television” first came into use and then the verb “televise” was created from it, also in supervision (noun) and supervise (verb) (Varga, 2010).

g. Conversion:

Conversion (also known as zero affixation) is a change in the function of a word. This process can happen that a lexeme is assigned to another word class (part of speech) without changing its form, as in e.g. bottle (noun) → bottle (verb), and in daily (adjective) → daily (noun) (Varga, 2010).

h. Acronyms:

Acronyms are new words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words (Varga, 2010). That is, means forming a lexeme from the initial letters or larger parts of words. Many of these are pronounced as words, e.g. as in “NATO” for ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’.

i. Derivation:

One of the major word-forming processes is derivation (=affixation), i.e. creating a new lexeme by means of adding a derivational prefix or suffix to an old lexeme. This process is accomplished by means of a large number of small “bits” of the English language which are not usually given separate listings in dictionaries. These small “bits” are generally described as affixes. For instance, the lexeme kingdom is derived from the stem {king}, to which the derivational suffix {-dom} has been added, or the lexeme impolite is derived from the stem {polite}, with the derivational prefix {in-}, or the lexeme unhappiness is derived from the stem unhappy (itself derived from happy), by adding the derivational suffix {-ness}. The lexemes produced by affixation can be called derivative words, or simply just derivatives (Yulu,2010).

III. Words

‘Word’ is a term in common everyday use but one which linguists cannot easily define. Is isn’t for example one word or two? And how about mother-in-law? It denotes one concept but is formed out of three recognisable ‘words’: mother, in and law. Linguists therefore prefer other terms, referring to morphs, morphemes and lexemes when talking about ‘words’.

IV. Types of Morphemes

We can recognize that English word forms such as talks, talker, talked and talking must consist of one element talk, and a number of other elements such as -s, -er, -ed and -ing. All these elements are described as morphemes. Therefore, a morpheme can be defined as “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.”

a Free and bound morphemes

According to Yule (2010), a broad distinction can be made between two types of morphemes. There are free morphemes, which are the type of morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for instance, ‘open’ and ‘tour’. The other type is what is knowen as bound morphemes. We mean, by bound morphemes are those forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. These forms were described in as affixes

• Example: The word “trees”

Tree is an example of a free morpheme as it can stand on its own and has a lexical meaning. “-s” on the other hand is simply a letter (graph) / sound (phone) which turns the lexeme tree into a plural. It is a separate morpheme as it contributes (grammatical) meaning to the whole: trees. The “-s” cannot stand on its own and is therefore a bound morpheme, a suffix.

Note: There are a number of English words in which the element treated as the stem is not, in fact, a free morpheme. For example the word receive, we can identify the bound morpheme “re-”  at the beginning, but the elements “–ceive” is not separate word form and hence cannot be a free morpheme. This type of forms is sometimes described as “bound stems” to keep them distinct from “free stems” such as “dress” (Yulu, 2010).

b. Lexical and functional morphemes

Free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that carry the “content” of the messages we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes such as: girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look, follow, break. In language we are able to add new lexical morphemes easily, so they are treated as an “open” class of words.The other Other types of free morphemes are called functional morphemes like the words: but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a “closed” class of words (Yulu,2010).

c. Derivational and inflectional morphemes:

The set of affixes that make up the category of bound morphemes can also be divided into two types. The first type was described in terms of the derivation of words. These are the derivational morphemes. These bound morphemes are used to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For instance, the addition of the derivational morpheme “-ness” changes the adjective “good” to the noun “goodness”. A list of derivational morphemes include both suffixes such as the -ish, -ly, -ment, also it includes prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-, un and many more (Yulu,2010).

The second type of bound morphemes contains what are called inflectional morphemes. These are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show:

• if a word is plural or singular
• if it is past tense or not
• if it is a comparative or possessive form.

English has only eight inflectional morphemes (or “inflections”). In English, all the inflectional morphemes are suffixes.

• Noun + -’s, -s
• Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en
• Adjective + -er, -est

V. Morphological description

The difference between derivational and inflectional morphemes is worth emphasizing. An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. For instance, both “old” and “older” are adjectives. The “-er” inflection here simply creates a different version of the adjective. However, a derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word. The verb “teach” becomes the noun teacher if we add the derivational morpheme “–er” (Yulu,2010).

For example, in the sentence “The child’s wildness shocked the teachers”, we can identify eleven morphemes.

The                      child                      -’s                          wild       -ness                   

functional           lexical                inflectional              lexical    derivational      

shock          -ed                        the                 - teach                 -er                   -s

lexical   inflectional           functional           lexical          derivational       inflectional

VI. Morphs and allomorphs

Morphs are the actual forms used to realize morphemes (Yulu,2010). For instance, "students" consists of two morphemes, student + suffix “s”. Students is comprised of "one or more morphs". In the other hand, allomorphs are different realizations of one morpheme. For example, the words cats, dogs and buses all contain a plural morpheme, and we can deduce that the pluralizing morphemes (-s and -es) have three different potential pronunciations - /s/, /z/ and /iz/. We call these allomorphs because they represent different pronunciation potentials of the same morphemes.

References:

Yule, George. (2010) The study of language. Cambridge, UK ; Cambridge University Press.

László, Varga. (2010) Introduction to English Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University.