Friday 10 October 2008

Morphology

The Study of Language by George Yule (2006)

New words
Morphology: the analysis of the structure of words
Free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand by itself as a single word
Bound morpheme: a morpheme such as un- or –ed that cannot stand alone and must be attached to another form (e.g. undressed)
Stem: the base form to which affixes are attached in the formation of words
Lexical morpheme: a free morpheme that is a content word such as a noun or verb
Functional morpheme: a free morpheme that is used as a function word, such as a conjunction (and) or a preposition (in)
Derivational morpheme: a bound morpheme such as –ish used to make new words or words of a different grammatical category (e.g. boysh), in contrast to an inflectional morpheme.
Inflectional morpheme: a bound morpheme used to indicate the grammatical function of a word, also called an ‘infection’ (e.g. dogs, walked)
Morph: an actual form used as part of a word, representing one version of a morpheme
Allomorph: one of a closely related set of morphs
Reduplication: the process of repeating all or part of a form

Study questions
1 when, he, the, an, and, a, of
2 a) –less, -ly, mis-, pre-, -er, -en, -ed, un-, -er b) atypical
3 –ing, -ed, -est, -s’, -s
4 –a, -s, -en, ø, -es, -i
5 abaloŋgo, tawa, kaĵi, bibili, kumain
6 Reduplication is the process of repeating all or part of a form

No comments: