Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Nino Kirvalidze
14
Words have internal structure, which is rule-governed
. For example, 
uneaten
, 
uninterest-
ing
and 
ungrammatical
are words in English, but 
∗
eatenun
, 
∗
interestingun
and 
∗
grammaticalun
(to mean “not eaten,” “not interesting,” “not grammatical”) are not, because we do not form a 
negative meaning of a word by 
suffixing 
-
un
(i.e., by adding it to the end of the word), but by 
prefixing
it (i.e., by adding it to the beginning of a word). Some people think that words are the 
basic meaningful elements of language, but we have seen that this cannot be so, since some 
words contain several distinct units of meaning. 
The most elemental meaningful lingual unit is 
a morpheme.
The word is derived from the Greek word 
morphe
, which means “form.”
Morphology is the study of internal structure of words and the rules by which words are 
formed.
Somewhat paradoxically, morphology is both the oldest and one of the youngest 
subdisciplines of grammar. It is the oldest because, as far as we know, the first linguists were 
primarily morphologists. We find a number of lists of morphological forms of Sumerian words 
(Sumerian was the traditional literary language of Mesopotamia) on clay tablets, dating from 
around 1600 BC. Morphology was also prominent in the writings the antique grammarians of 
India, Greece and Rome.
The term 
morphology
was invented in the second part of the 19
th
century and it means 
“the science of word forms” 
(
morphe
= “form”, 
ology
= “science of” or “branch of knowledge 
of”). Earlier there was no need for a special term, because the term 
grammar
mostly implied 
word structure, i.e. morphology. The terms 
phonology
(for sound structure) and 
syntax
(for 
sentence structure) had existed for centuries when the term morphology was introduced. Thus, 
in this sense, morphology is a young discipline (Haspelmath 2002: 1-2). Part of knowing a 
language is knowing its morphology. Like most linguistic knowledge, this is generally uncons-
cious knowledge.
A morpheme is a minimal meaningful lingual unit which may be represented by a se-
quence of sounds or a single sound: 
boy-s
; 
buil-t
, 
beauti-ful,
etc. Thus a morpheme is an 
arbitrary union of a form (i.e. sounds) and a meaning as the link between them is a matter of 
convention. Every word in every language is composed of one or more morphemes: 
one morpheme boy 
two morphemes boy + ish 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof.