Morphological structure of words Plan What is morphology.? 2

Morphological structure of words

Plan

1.What is morphology.?

2. Free and Bound Morphemes

3. Roots and Affixes

4. Stems

5. Derivational and Functional Affixes

Morphology is the study of structure, or form, or description of word-formation (as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language and the system of word-forming elements and processes in a language. William O’Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller add that morphology is “the system of categories and rules involved in word-formation and interpretation”. In morphology, the proper topic of study is the play of prefixes and suffixes or the internal changes within the word, which modify the word’s basic meaning. Modern descriptive linguists prefer such traditional terms as inflectional endings, root, stem, and morpheme. Where the traditional grammar would describe cats as consisting of the root cat and –s as an inflectional plural ending, the modern structural linguist would describe both cat and the ending–s as two different morphemes or units of meaning --one carrying the basic meaning of the word; the other, the accessory notion of plurality. However, a distinction would be set up between the two by labeling cat as a free morpheme, which could be used in isolation, and ending–s as a bound morpheme, which has no separate existence. Bloomfield labeled the meaning of the morpheme a “sememe”; however, linguists did not study the meaning of a morpheme, so this term was dropped out of usage in linguistics. Bloomfield recognized that the complex meaning in a language is not simply the result of combining morphemes. He called the basic feature of arrangement of morphemes a taxeme. He believes taxemes are meaningless, if taken in the abstract. Combinations of single taxemes occur as conventional grammatical arrangements, tactic forms. In a linguistic system, a taxeme is parallel to the phoneme in that neither has a meaning, but each is a minimal form-- a phoneme at the phonological level and a taxeme at the grammatical .