Words versus 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.

MORPHEME = smallest unit of meaning

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

1. Dogs

2. Laughed

3. Working

4. Believe

5. Unbelievable

6. Sang

WORD = smallest standalone unit of meaning (or minimal standalone symbolic unit)

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!!!!!!!!!

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) Identify the prefixes / suffixes in these words. Which of these morphemes is inflectional / deriviational?

1. Dogs

2. Laughed

3. Unbelievable

4. Reconsider

5. Working

6. Smaller

7. Outmaneouvre

8. Careless

9. Intensify

10. Manageress

11. Slept

(2) Can you correct the following sentences? What is wrong with them?

1. He see the cat eats the food.

2. My house is big than yours.

(3) How does the pronunciation of the past tense vary across the following sentences?

1. He dropped the book

2. He turned the corner

3. She skidded on the mat

(4) What's the problem with the following sentences?

1. He is uneducated and untolerant

2. While Jack is a sporty person, Anna is more booky

3. While Mary embraced motherhood, she wasn't so keen on wifehood

4. Jane quickly realised the falseness of the information.

Now complete the following statements about the two types of morpheme, citing the examples above (answers provided).

1. While INFLECTIONAL morphemes are involved in syntactic processes, DERIVATIONAL morphemes are not.

2. INFLECTIONAL morphemes participate in phonological processes to a greater extent than DERIVATIONAL morphemes

3. While INFLECTIONAL morphemes are very productive (we can add them to many words), DERIVATIONAL morphemes are less productive.

4. While DERIVATIONAL morphemes can come at the beginning and ends of words (prefixes and suffixes), INFLECTIONAL morphemes can only come at the end (suffix)

Other differences: (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

2. We add deriviational affixes

3. We add an inflectional affix

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.

Many studies quantify children's language abilities using the Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes.

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.

5 minute exercise

Look at these examples. What does the suffix 'mouth' mean? How do you pronounce it in each word?

1. Portsmouth

2. Plymouth

3. Tynemouth

4. Grangemouth

5. Cockermouth