ENG509 Midterm Short Notes by MAS All Rounder

Lesson 01 What is Morphology?

Topic: 01: Introduction:

Some basic notions in morphology. What does morphology study? What ar ysis? What is its place in general theory of grammar?

•  The term morphology  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832)  Greek: morph- means ‘shape, form’,  Morphology is the study of form or forms 

In linguistics “morphology refers to

The mental system involved in word formation Or The branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. 

According to Fabregas & Scalise (2012):

Morphology is the part of linguistics that studies grammatical properties of words and how words relate to each other in a language.

The chief task of morphology:

b. deepen (2)a. dog b. dogs Deep and dog are morpheme that denote a property having to do with a physical dimension or referring to e the goals of morphological anal

(1) a. deep How words are related to each other? Are there their some aspects of morphological research which have something to do with morphology?

Topic: 02: Morpheme:

Morphologists investigate words:

Their internal structure How they are formed. ‘The smallest linguistic pieces with a grammatical function.’ Not inclusive definition

•  A morpheme may consist of a word, such as hand,  A meaningful piece of a word, such as the -ed of looked,

Another way in which morphemes have been defined is as:

‘ a pairing between sound and meaning.’ Some morphemes have no concrete form or no continuous form,  Some do not have meanings in the conventional sense of the term The term morph: specifically to the phonological realization of a morpheme. -ed has various morphs [t] jumped  [d] repelled [ed] rooted and wedded  Let’s consider Reconsideration. Re + consider + ation. Stem: ‘A stem is a base unit to which another morphological piece is attached. Root: consider a root is like a stem in constituting the core of the word to which other pieces attach, but the term refers only to morphologically simple units. For example, disagree is the stem of disagreement,. -ation: -ate and -ion, (cf. *reconsiderate), Consider the English words lovely and quickly. the suffix -ly. Two other sorts of affixes infixes and circumfixes. (1) Root -um /sulat/ /s-um-ulat/ ‘one who wrote’ (2) /gradwet/ /gr-um-adwet/ ‘one who graduated’ Circumfixes stem besar ‘big’ to form a noun ke-besar-an meaning ‘bigness, greatness’ (MacDonald 1976: 63; Beard 1998: 62).

Topic: 03: Morphology in Action:

These are examples of morphology in action – Morphological facts of everyday life. Novel words and word play “Rebop,” Consider now the following phrases, taken from a Toni Braxton song: Unbreak my heart, uncry these tears All human beings have this capacity for generating and understanding novel words. Sometimes someone creates an entirely new word, as J. R. R. Tolkien ‘hobbit’. But more often than not, we build new words from pre-existing pieces, as with unbreak and uncry, or as with hobbitish and hobbit-like, built by adding suffixes to the stem hobbit. We could easily go on to create more words on these patterns. Novel words are all around us.

Topic: 04: Abstract Morphological Facts:

1. I eat one melon a day.

2. We eat two melons a day.

3. *We eat two melon a day. No morphological plural