Words and morphemes
• Mono-morphemic words ---- free morphemes
• Poly-morphemic words compounds ---- free + free the rest ---- free + bound ---- bound + bound
• All words contain a root morpheme. (free or bound)
Affix
• An affix is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used only when added to another morpheme. (bound)
• A morpheme may have alternate shapes or phonetic forms. They are said to be the allomorphs of the morpheme, the plural morpheme may be represented by:
• Closed class words---grammatical or functional words, such as conjunction, articles, preposition and pronouns.
3.3 Morpheme
---- the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function.
morpheme.
3.4 classification of morphemes
Free morpheme & bound morpheme
• Free morpheme----is one that may constitute a word (free form) by itself, such as bed, tree, sing, dance, etc.
• Bound morpheme----is one that may appear with at least one other morpheme. They can not stand by themselves, such as “-s” in “dogs”, “-al” in “national”, “dis-” in “disclose”, “-ed” in “recorded”, etc.
---- the minimal unit of meaning
Words & morphems
---Words are composed of morphemes. Words may consist of one morpheme or more morphemes, e.g.
• 1-morpheme boy, desire • 2-morpheme boy+ish, desir(e)+ble • 3-morpheme boy+ish+ness, desir(e)+bl(e)+ity • 4-morpheme gentle+man+li+ness, • 5-morpheme un+gentle+man+li+ness • 6-morpheme anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+anorph
• A morpheme is a meaning and a stretch of sound joined together.
• A morph is the stretch of sound. e.g. boys John’s the suffix /-z/
Morpheme & allomorphs
• Prefix ---- morphemes that occur only before others, e.g. un-, dis, anti-, ir-, etc.
Chapter 3 Morphology
3.2 Open class & closed class
• Open class words---content words of a language to which we can regularly add new words, such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, e.g. beatnik (a member of the Beat Generation), hacker, email, internet, “达人，走秀…” in Chinese.
Root and affixes
• internationality
Root
• The root constitutes the core of the word and carries the major component of its meaning.
• It is that part of the word left when all the affixes (inflectional & derivational) are removed. e.g. “desire” in “desirable”, “care” in “carefully”, “nation” in “internationalism”…
• map----maps [s] • dog----dogs [z] • watch----watches [iz] • mouse----mice [ai] • ox----oxen [n] • tooth----teeth [i:] • sheep----sheep [i:] • Each of the underlined part is called an allomorph of plural