TheMinistry of Higher and secondary education of the Republic of Uzbekistan The Uzbekistan state World Languages University

English Morpholgy

Morphology is the study of how words are structured and how they are put together from smaller parts. To convey meaning, sounds are combined into words. But in fact, words are not the smallest unit of meaning. Many words are made of smaller units of meaning, and these units are combined in particular ways, forming words. Morpheme A morpheme, designated with braces, { }, is smallest meaningbearing unit of language. For example, {re-} is not a word, but it does carry meaning. A morpheme ordinarily consists of a sequence of one or more phonemes. Yule (2002) states that a morpheme is the minimal linguistic unit which has a meaning or grammatical function.

Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural. In the sentence The police reopened the investigation, the word reopened consists of three morphemes, a minimal unit is {open}, a minimal unit of meaning is {re-} (meaning ‘again’), and a minimal unit of grammatical function is {-ed} (indicating past-tense’). A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes:

In short, a morpheme is defined as the minimal linguistic sign, a grammatical unit that is an arbitrary union of sound and a meaning and that cannot be further analyzed. The term ‘word’ is part of everyone’s vocabulary. We all think we understand what words are. What’s more, we are right to think this, at some level. In this book I will not suggest that our ordinary notion of the word needs to be replaced with something radically different. Rather, I want to show how our ordinary notion can be made more precise. This will involve teasing apart the bundle of ingredients that go to make up the notion, showing how these ingredients interact, and introducing ways of talking about each one separately. After reading this book, you will still go on using the term ‘word’ in talking about language, both in everyday conversation and in more formal contexts, such as literary criticism or English language study; but I hope that, in these more formal contexts, you will talk about words more confidently, knowing exactly which ingredients of the notion you have in mind at any one time, and able where necessary to use appropriate terminology in order to make your meaning absolutely clear. This is a textbook for students of the English language or of English literature, not primarily for students of linguistics. Nevertheless, what I say will be consistent with mainstream linguistic views on wordstructure, so any readers who go on to more advanced linguistics will not encounter too many inconsistencies. A good way of teasing apart the ingredients in the notion ‘word’ is by explicitly contrasting them. Here are the contrasts that we will be looking at, and the chapters where they will be discussed:

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  words as units of meaning versus units of sentence structure
  
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  words as pronounceable entities (‘word forms’) versus more abstract entities (sets of word forms)
  
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  inflectionally related word forms (forms of the same ‘word’) versus derivationally related words (different ‘words’ with a shared base)
  
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  the distinction between compound words and phrases
  
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  the relationship between the internal structure of a word and its meaning
  
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  productive versus unproductive word-forming processes
  
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  historical reasons for some of the contemporary divisions within English morphology, especially
  

These various contrasts impact on one another in various ways. For example, if one takes the view that the distinction between compound words and phrases is unimportant, or is even perhaps a bogus distinction fundamentally, this will have a considerable effect on how one views the word as a unit of sentence-structure. Linguistic scholars who specialise in the study of words (so-called ‘morphologists’) devote considerable effort to working out the implications of different ways of formulating these distinctions, as they strive to discover the best way (that is, the most illuminating way, or the way that seems to accord most accurately with people’s implicit knowledge of their native languages). We will not be exploring the technical ramifications of these efforts in this book. Nevertheless, I will need to ensure that the way I draw the distinctions here yields a coherent overall picture, and some cross-referencing between chapters will be necessary for that. Each of Chapters 2 to 9 inclusive is provided with exercises. This is designed to make the book suitable for a course extending over about ten weeks. Relatively full discussions of the exercises are also provided at the end of the book. For those exercises that are open-ended (that is, ones for which there is no obvious ‘right’ answer), these discussions serve to illustrate and extend points made in the chapter. As befits a book aimed at students of English rather than linguistics students, references to the technical literature are kept to a minimum. However, the ‘Recommendations for reading’ at the end of each chapter contain some hints for any readers who would like to delve into this literature, as well as pointing towards more detailed treatments of English morphology in particular. Finally, I would like to encourage comments and criticisms. My choice of what to emphasise and what to leave out will inevitably not please everyone, nor will some of the details of what I say. I hope, however, that even those who find things to disagree with in this book will also find it useful for its intended introductory purpose, whether as students, teachers or general readers.

Of the available books on English morphology in particular, Bauer (1983) delves deepest into issues of linguistic theory (although a now somewhat dated version of it), and offers useful discussion and casestudies of fashions in derivational morphology. Marchand (1969) is factually encyclopedic. Adams (1973) concentrates on compounding (the subject-matter of our Chapter 6) and conversion (discussed here in Chapter 5), but says relatively little about derivation (covered here in Chapter 5). There is no book that deals adequately with morphology in general linguistic terms and that also takes into account fully up-to-date versions of syntactic and phonological theory. Bauer (1988) is a clear introductory text. The main strength of Matthews (1991) is its terminological precision. Carstairs-McCarthy (1992) is aimed at readers whose knowledge of linguistics is at advanced undergraduate level or beyond. Spencer (1991) covers much ground, and may be said to bridge the gap between Bauer and Carstairs-McCarthy.

We think of words as the basic units of language. When a baby begins to speak, the way the excited mother reports what has happened is: ‘Sally (or Tommy) has said her (or his) first word!’ We would be surprised at a mother who described little Tommy’s or Sally’s first utterance as a sentence. Sentences come later, we are inclined to feel, when words are strung together meaningfully. That is not to say that a sentence must always consist of more than one word. One-word commands such as ‘Go!’ or ‘Sit!’, although they crop up relatively seldom in everyday conversation or reading, are not in any way odd or un-English. Nevertheless, learning to talk in early childhood seems to be a matter of putting words together, not of taking sentences apart. There is a clear sense, then, in which words seem to be the buildingblocks of language. Even as adults, there are quite a few circumstances in which we use single words outside the context of any actual or reconstructable sentence. Here are some examples: • warning shouts, such as ‘Fire!’ • conventional commands, such as ‘Lights!’, Camera!’, ‘Action!’ • items on shopping lists, such as ‘carrots’, ‘cheese’, ‘eggs’. It is clear also that words on their own, outside sentences, can be sorted and classified in various ways. A comprehensive classification of English words according to meaning is a thesaurus, such as Roget’s Thesaurus. But the kind of conventional classification that we are likely to refer to most often is a dictionary, in which words are listed according to their spelling in alphabetical order. Given that English spelling is so erratic, a common reason for looking up a word in an English dictionary is to check how to spell it. But another very common reason is to check what it means. In fact, that is what a dictionary entry basically consists of: an association of a word, alphabetically listed, with a definition of what it means, and perhaps also some.
Information about grammar (the word class or part of speech that the word belongs to) and its pronunciation. Here, for example, is a specimen dictionary entry for the word month, based on the entry given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th edition):
month noun. Any of twelve portions into which the year is divided
It seems, then, that a word is not just a building-block of sentences: it is a building-block with a meaning that is unpredictable, or at least sufficiently unpredictable that learners of English, and even sometimes native speakers, may need to consult a dictionary in order to discover it. We may be tempted to think that this constitutes everything that needs to be said about words: they are units of language which are basic in two senses, both 1. in that they have meanings that are unpredictable and so must be listed in dictionaries and 2. in that they are the building-blocks out of which phrases and sentences are formed. However, if that were all that needed to be said, this would be a very short book – much shorter than it actually is! So in what respects do 1. and 2. jointly fall short as a characterisation of words and their behaviour? A large part of the answer lies in the fact that there are units of language that have characteristic 1. but not 2., and vice versa. Sections 2.3 and 2.4 are devoted to demonstrating this. First, though, we will deal in Section 2.2 with a distinction which, though important, is independent of the distinctions that apply to words in particular.