04 - Words and morphemes

Relevance of words and morphemes

Words and morphemes are the building blocks of sentences

In order to analyse sentence structure we need to know about words and morphemes

Language-impaired individuals, in particular children, tend to have morphological difficulties

Definitions

Both words and morphemes are 'symbolic', meaning that there is an arbitrary relationship between form and function.

WORD = smallest independent unit of meaning

Words can stand alone, e.g.

1. A: What was he doing? B: Working
2. B: How would you describe the experience? B: Unbelievable
3. Shark!!!!!!!!
4. Run!!!!!!!!!

MORPHEME = smallest independent unit of meaning

i.e. like the definition of a word but we have removed the requirement to be independent / stand alone.

How many 'units of meaning' in the following words:

1. Dog-s = 2 morphemes
2. Laugh-ed = 2 morphemes
3. Work-ing = 2 morphemes
4. Believe = 1 morpheme
5. Un-believ-able = 3 morphemes

Words versus morphemes

The key thing to note is that there is an overlap in the definition of words and morphemes. Therefore some words are also morphemes! For example, dog is a word and a morpheme. We say that this is a morphologically simple word. However, words often contain more than one morpheme, e.g. dog-s. This is a morphologically complex word, i.e. a word consisting of more than one morpheme.

Categorising morphemes

Morphemes can be free or bound. If a morpheme is free it can also be classified as a word (because it can 'stand alone'). In the following sentence, we have examples of both free and bound closed-class morphemes

1. Jack is (really) try-ing to run fast-er

Bound morphemes can be prefixes or suffixes (which are both kinds of affixes). Another type of bound morpheme is the infix, which comes in the middle of the word. English rarely uses infixes, and when they are used they sound "marked" (odd), e.g. fan-bloody-tastic). Other languages use infixes productively, e.g. Arabic

Morphemes are divided into two categories, inflectional and derivational. While inflectional morphemes make minor modifications to a word's meaning, derivational morphemes are used to derive a new word, either by substantially changing meaning or altering word class.

Words containing multiple morphemes are described as morphologically complex.

The difference between inflectional and derivational morphemes

(1) Inflectional morphemes are often affected by sentence position. For example, we use a special ending on the verb when the subject is 3rd person singular. We don't use that ending if the subject does not have these poperties, e.g.

1. The cat hate-s the messy dog
2. The cat-s hate the messy dog

Derivational morphemes do not have this property. For example, the adjective messy contains the derivational morpheme -y, which turns the noun mess into an adjective. This process can happen when the noun dog occurs in any position in the sentence.

(2) Inflectional morphemes are sensitive to phonetic context.

The regular tense ending is pronouncd /t/ /d/ or /Id/ depending on the form of the "root", e.g.

1. He dropped /t/ the book

2. He turned /d/ the corner

3. She skidded /Id/ on the mat

(3) Inflectional morphemes are more productive than derivational morphemes. For example, we can add the regular past tense ending to any new verb which comes into the English language, e.g. she googled, they chillaxed. Derivational morphemes are more tied to words. For example, both un-, and in- mean THE OPPOSITE. But we use un- with educated, and in- with tolerant

1. Uneducated
2. Intolerant
3. *Ineducated
4. ??Untolerant

* = very wrong, ?? = odd

(4) inflectional morphemes can only come at the end of words, while derivational morphemes can come at the beginning and ends, e.g.

1. laugh-ed
2. Un-break-able

Other differences between derivational and inflectional morphemes: (1) Derivational morphemes are longer (2) Derivational morphemes have more specific meanings, e.g. out in outmaneouvre means "to do something better than a competitor" (3) Derivational morphemes are more language-specific, e.g. out- prefix is not found in Spanish, and -ito/-illo diminutive suffixes are not used productively in English.

Word-building processes

There are three ways to form morphologically complex words using morphological processes

1. Inflection (adding inflectional morphemes), e.g. laugh-ed
2. Derivation (adding derivational morphemes), e.g. un-do
3. Compounding (taking two words and "squishing" them together), e.g. fire man, book seller

Generally the last two are described as word-building processes as they can be used to coin new words, e.g. skypeable, or red jacket man/woman (a mysterious handsome stranger you see on the Metro every morning)

When we build morphologically-complex words, we tend follow a particular order

1. We start out with the root (e.g. mention)
2. We add deriviational affixes (e.g. un-mention-able)
3. We add an inflectional affix (e.g. un-mention-able-s)

This gives the impression that we build up the words in a series of steps.

Morphemes and language impairment

Individuals with language impairment struggle with inflectional morphemes. In particular, children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often miss out tense morphemes, e.g. regular past tense. For example, they might say I laugh at the joke instead of I laughed at the joke

They also have difficulties making sure that the verb agrees with the subject, e.g. She always laugh at my jokes. The subject is third person singular, so the verb should be laugh-s

Many studies quantify children's language abilities using the Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes (total number of morphemes divided by the total number of utterances).

Language-impaired individuals tend to have difficulties using derivational morphemes. It is worthwhile teaching these morphemes in clinic as they can be used to build words.

Novel morphemes

This is not essential knowledge for speech and language therapists, and is not an obligatory exam topic, but if you find linguistics intriguing and fun, you might wish to read on...

Inflectional morphemes are generally viewed as a closed class. However, every now and then a new derivational morpheme comes along. A classic example is the -gate morpheme which is used to designate a government scandal, e.g. watergate, partygate, iraqgate, camillagate etc. Here are a couple more examples

1. -core suffix as an cottage core. Its first usage was in the term hardcore to describe a material for road suracing. Core had a literal meaning to describe the material underneath the tarmac. Then it was used to describe very aggressive punk music, characterised by a very dedicated and fanatical fanbase. Then the term emocore came along. Emo refers to a genre of rock music which is associated with certain types of emotion, e.g. sadness, sensitivity and introspection, and the -core suffix took on the meaning of having a dedicated and fanatical fanbase. However, this is arguably ironic, as emocore fans were relatively passive compared to their punk counterparts. After this, -core became used as a general term to denote an artistic movement, first, mumblecore (films from the early nineties following the lives of intelligent, arty and nihilistic twenty-year olds, and usually starring Greta Gerwig), and now cottagecore, i.e. genre of fashion characterised by wearing old-fashioned floral countrified clothes. The core example is interesting as it shows how a literal meaning (foundation for a road) turned into a figurative meaning (dedication to an artistic movement), which then morphed over time, and became gradually more ironic.
2. -tifa morpheme. This comes from the word antifa used to describe anti-fascist protesters. During recent civil unrest in the US, partly in response to the George Floyd killing, the word grantifa was used to describe protesters who were elderly women. In this case, the word -tifa has begun to function as a morpheme with the meaning "group of protestors"

5 minute exercise

Look at these examples. How do you pronounce berry? Why does the pronunciation change for some words?

1. Blackberry
2. Strawberry
3. Loganberry
4. Gooseberry
5. Boysenberry