Basic Morphology

Part of linguistics involves looking at grammatical analysis that involves recognising the basic units (or building blocks) in a linguistic expression and classifying them into various types. Morphology helps you see how words can be built up out of morphemes, which are the smallest units of meaning or grammatical function. From this you can deduce that no part of a word that is meaningless on its own can be a morpheme.

Let us look at a simple example, the English word reads. The initial sound of this word r has no meaning in English, neither has the vowel ea in the middle of the word, or the consonant d. They are therefore not morphemes, but only sounds. However, the set of letters or sounds represented by read has a meaning. The next letter or sound -s also has a meaning; it might not be as easily described as the meaning of read, but it still contributes to the meaning of the whole word by changing or adding something to the meaning of the word read, in this case the present tense for a single person, and as such it is considered a morpheme.

Types of morphemes

Morphology

Types of Morphemes

Classification of morphemes

By now you know the definition of morpheme, and the various types of morphemes, such as affixes, based on their position in a word, i.e. we looked at the structural patterns of morphemes. In this section, we will look at a dif­ferent way of classifying types of morphemes, based on the type of meaning they convey, or based on their functional patterns in words. Traditional linguists usually distinguished between two different types of morphological operations, namely: derivation and inflection. Likewise, we will distinguish between inflectional affixes which are related to the grammatical aspects of language such as tense, number and gender, and derivational affixes which attach to a root or stem to form new lexemes (with a new meaning).

For example, in the word teachers, we have a root teach and two affixes, -er and -s. These two affixes are somewhat different in their function. The -s performs a grammatical function, turning a singular noun teacher into a plural noun teachers. Inflectional affixes are very regular, i.e. if an inflectional affix like -s attaches to one word in a word class, it usually attaches to all the words in that word class. A large proportion of the English nouns are made plural by adding -s, e.g. dogs, umbrellas, doughnuts, etc. Inflectional affixes do not change the word class (or part of speech) of the stem. Teacher and teachers are both nouns, so the word class has not changed.

-er is a derivational affix as it turns the verb teach into a noun teacher, thereby form­ing an entirely new lexeme. Derivational affixes are more irregular than inflectional affixes, in that they can attach to some words in a word class but not to others. For example we can say teacher and writer and singer but not *fixer, *nurser or *guarder.

Other examples of inflectional affixes in English are -ed which changes the tense of a verb (work – worked), and -ess which changes the gender of a noun (lion – lion­ess). Other examples of derivational affixes include the suffix -y which turns a noun or verb into an adjective (dream – dreamy) and the prefix em- which changes the meaning of a word such as power from an abstract noun into an action in empower. It is also important to note that in English inflectional morphemes which are eight in total are typically suffixed in a word after derivational morphemes. Following is a table of English inflectional affixes.