Chapter 3: Morphology

by Susan Dostert

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.

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’.

Morpheme types

Morphemes are defined as the smallest meaning-bearing units in language. These are abstract units, realised in actual language by a morph, or if there are various ways of realising one morpheme by its allomorphs. If morphemes are free they will coincide with what we call a word, but morphemes can also be bound in which case they are less than a word (although they carry meaning). The free morphemes are generally also referred to as lexemes, and the bound ones as affixes. (Note that lexemes can be simple i.e. consisting of just one free morpheme or complex consisting of 2 or more morphemes of which at least one is free.) Affixes which come in front of a free morpheme are prefixes, and those which come after are suffixes.

Example:
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 (technical term: graph) / sound (technical term: 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.

Some special sub-types of morph are the cranberry or unique morph, which only occurs in one lexeme in a particular language, the zero morph, which has a meaning / function but no form, and the portmanteau morph, where more than one morpheme (or meaning) is fused together in one form.

Inflection

Bound morphemes which carry grammatical (or functional) meaning are called inflectional affixes and their function is to create new forms of existing lexemes. In English these are always suffixes, i.e. there are no inflectional prefixes in English. It is generally claimed that there are only eight such inflectional affixes left in English, making Modern English an analytic language.

Example:

Derivation

Other affixes (which can be prefixes or suffixes) have lexical meaning and are used to create new lexemes.

Example:

dis-obey
obe(y)-dient

obey is a lexeme (i.e. a free morpheme) and a verb meaning “to do what you are told or expected to do”. If we prefix dis- to this morpheme we change the meaning completely to a something more like “to refuse to obey”. In other words, we have created a whole new verb/ lexeme (with a new lexical meaning) rather than just a new form of the same lexeme. This important process is one of the major ways in which the English lexicon has been formed, and is called derivation. Looking at obedient, we see that a suffix has been added here (and the graph y dropped). Again the meaning has been transformed: obedient means “willing to obey”, but crucially in this case the word class has also changed as obedient is an adjective and no longer a verb. This is something that frequently happens in derivation but does not have to (as exemplified by disobey).

Other more productive word-formation processes

Derivation is one of the three major (and most productive) types of word-formation processes visible in English. The other two most important ones are compounding and conversion. In compounding (which is even more productive in German), free morphemes (lexemes) are combined to form new, longer ones.

Example:
keyboard
kick-off
leap year

Each of these three examples consists of two free morphemes which have been joined together to form a new lexeme / concept. Prototypically these will be noun + noun (N+N) compounds (e.g. keyboard), but other combinations are possible e.g. kick-off consisting of a verb / noun1 + preposition (V/N+P). Note also that the orthography of such compounds can vary, either being written as separate units, hyphenated or as one. (Unfortunately, there is no clear rule to predict the spelling, although there is a tendency for newer compounds to be written separately at first, later hyphenated, and then possibly becoming one unit after much use.)

Total conversion (also sometimes referred to as zero derivation) is a process involving word class change but without any changes to the form of the lexeme. In partial conversion the spoken form may change.

Example:

In the first example, elbow is a noun, but then the same (superficially unchanged) lexeme is being used as a verb and has received the regular past tense ending. In the second example, subject is first being used as a noun with the main stress on the first syllable, but then it has been converted to a verb and the stress has shifted to the second syllable. elbow is therefore an example of (N→V) total conversion and subject an example of (N→V) partial conversion as the spoken form has changed.

Less productive word-formation processes

Apart from these ‘big three’, there are further ways of expanding the lexicon, but none of them are terribly productive in English. These are: blending, clipping, back-formation, acronyms and initialisms and all involve shortening the source lexeme(s) in some way.

In blending, at least two free morphemes are ‘fused’ or ‘melted’ together whereby typically the front of one and the end of the other remain to create a new lexeme.

Example:
electrocute = ELECTROnic + exeCUTE
brash = Bold + RASH
snazzy = SNappy + jAZZY

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.

Example:

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

Back-formation is a slightly more complex type of word-formation process as it involves removing something which is not actually present. In this process we can see how analogies work to change the language, as something which is considered an affix (on the basis of other lexemes) is dropped to create a new lexeme.

Example:

stage manager → stage manage (cp. teach → teacher etc.)
donation → donate (cp. relate → relation etc.)

The –er suffix is one found on countless nouns derived from verbs e.g. teacher, reader, driver, etc. Assuming, therefore, that the –er in stage manager is comparable to these, speakers start to drop the suffix to create what is considered to be the verb from which it could have derived.

The difference between such examples and those created by derivation is therefore one of direction or chronology. In derivation we start with the shorter lexeme and affix a further morpheme to create a new lexeme. In back-formation, in contrast, we drop what looks like an affix (but is in fact simply part of the source lexeme) to create the new, shorter one.

The two remaining word-formation processes: acronyms and initialisms are both formed in the same way but then pronounced differently. Both are (normally) based on the initial letters of a string of words (or phrase), but where the initialism continues to pronounce these as separate letters (e.g. USA and DNA), the acronym (e.g. scuba and NATO) pronounces them as if they were a ‘normal’ word.

Example:

scuba = self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
NATO = North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
USA = United States of America
DNA = deoxyribonucleic acid

Borrowing

This is a further way of expanding the lexicon, and one which has played a major role in the development of English, but is not normally considered one of the word-formation processes.

Word classes

We tend to distinguish between open word classes, which include nouns, full verbs, adjectives and some adverbs, and more closed word classes to which pronouns, prepositions, determiners, modal (verb)s, auxiliaries, primary verbs, conjunctions, etc. belong. Theoretically, all of the lexemes in the English language can be assigned to one of these even if it is often difficult to carry out when they occur in isolation (i.e. without context) as many word forms can belong to more than one word class e.g. round can be a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb or a preposition.

Reading

Finegan, Edward (2004). Language: Its Structure and Use. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Ch. 2.

Kortmann, Bernd (2005). English Linguistics: Essentials. Berlin: Cornelsen Verlag. Ch. 3.

Advanced Reading

Pinker, Steven (1999). Words and Rules. The Ingredients of Language. London: Phoenix.  

Plag, Ingo (2003). Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

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