MORPHOLOGY AND WORD FORMATION

                                                          MORPHOLOGY AND WORD FORMATION

 DEFINITION  

According to the traditional linguistic theories,grammatical description largely operates on two important units: the word and the sentence. These two units form the basis of different writing system in various languages of the world. This section is intended to examine the term word and the smaller elements that constitute words. A word is a single unit of language, which means something and can be spoken or written .The English word unkind is made up of two smaller units: un and kind. These are minimal units that cannot be further sub-divided into meaningful units. Such minimal, meaningful units of grammatical description are generally referred to as morphemes (already briefly introduced in Chapter 6).A morpheme is a short segment of language that meets three criteria: 

1. It is a word or apart of a word that has meaning.

 2. It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts without violation of its meaning or without meaning.

 3. It recurs in differing verbal environments with are latively stable meaning. The word unlikely has three morphemes while the word carpet is a single morpheme. The words car and pet are independent morphemes in themselves,but the word carpet has nothing to do with the meanings of car and pet. Carpet is a minimal meaningful unit by itself. Again, the word garbage is a single morpheme while the words garbandage are independent morphemes by themselves.A systematic study of morphemes or how morphemes join to form words is known as morphology. The definition of the morpheme may not be completely unassailable as will be evident from the discussion that follows, but it is certainly a very satisfying definition applicable to a majority of words in any language.The English word unassailable is made up of three morphemes, un,assail, able, each one of which has a particular meaning distribution and a particular phonological form or shape. 

SEGMENTATION

A large number of such words as can be divided into segments are said to be determinate with respect to segmentation. 

EXAMPLES  boys boy-s unable un-able playing play-ing knowingly know-ing-lypassed pass-ed watches watch-es But there are several words which can either not be segmented(indeterminate) at all or are only partially determinate with respect to segmentation.

 EXAMPLES  men,children,mice,sheep,went,took,broke,sang,brought,better,best,worse,wo rst. Theproblemsofsegmentationinallsuchwordsmayvaryinkindaswellasindegree.Thispresentsaseriousprobl em.Althoughbetterandwentstandinthesamegrammaticalrelationshipwithgood and go as higher and played have with high and play, yet the words better and went cannot be segmented into parts(as higher and played)as per the given definition of the term morpheme. 

Since we know that better as the same grammatical function vis-a-visgood as taller has vis-a-vis tall, we can express the relationship as a proportion of grammatical(or distributional)equivalence: good:better:best::tall:taller:tallest Good and tall are both adjectives and the expression better and taller are grammatically alike in the sense that they both express only the comparative degree of the adjective.Similarly,be stand tallest too are alike as they express the superlative degree of the adjective.Now suppose, on an analogy from algebra, we resolve each of the six words given above into factors/components,the word good being denoted by the factoral ,tall by ,the positive,comparative and superlative functions being marked by factors x, y and z respectively,the above equivalence can be rewritten as ax:ay:az::bx:by:bz 

    All the three words on the left-hand side have the component a (i.e.good)in the man those on the right and side have the component  (i.e. tall) in them. Components x, y and z stand to mark the positive,comparative and superlative degrees of the adjectives in question. All these components, or distributional factors of words are morphemes. Thus a morpheme may not necessarily be apart or segment of a word, it may merely have a factorial role as indicated above. When a word is segmented into parts,the segments are referred to as 'morphs'.

    The word happier thus consists of two morphs which can be orthographically written as happy and er(conventions of English orthography allowing a change .In phonological transcription, the two morphs can be represented as /hæpı/ and /∂/.Each morph thus represents(or is the exponent or factor of)a particular morpheme. The terms ‘morpheme’ and‘ morph’ are thus  comparable to the terms‘ form’ and‘ substance’ given by Ferdinand de Saussure                            Themorphemeisanelementofformwhichmayberepresenteddirectlybyphonological (or ortho graphical)segments with a particular‘shape’(i.e. by morphs). It is customary to represent morphemes between braces. For example,the word went(phonologically/went/)which cannot be segmented into morphs, represents the combination of two morphemes :go and past. Sometimes, a particular morpheme may be represented not by the same morph but by different morphs in different environments. Such different representations of a morpheme are called allomorphs. The plural morpheme in English (which combines with an morpheme to form a plural) is represented by three allomorphs /s/, /z/and/Iz/ indifferent environments(which are phonologically conditioned). Plural morpheme Past morpheme The relationship between the terms morph,allomorph and morpheme is similar to that between phone,allophone and phoneme .