Morphology
Morphology
Morphology
Module 3
Morphology
• Morphology is the study of the structure of words.
• Words are formed by combining smaller units of linguistic information called
morphemes, the building blocks of words.
• Morpheme is defined as the minimum word bearing unit
• For Example: Fox – 1 Morpheme - Fox
Cats – 2 Morphemes – Cat , s
English Morphology
• Morphology is the study of the ways that words are built up from
smaller meaningful units called morphemes
• We can usefully divide morphemes into two classes
• Stems: The core meaning bearing units – Main morpheme of the word
• Affixes: Bits and pieces that adhere to stems to change their meanings and
grammatical functions
Additional meaning of various kind -Prefix, suffix, infix and circumfix
Types of affixes
•Additional meaning of various kind -Prefix, suffix, infix and
circumfix.
• Bound Morphemes: Morphemes which are not words in their own right, but
have to be attached in some way to a free morpheme.
• e.g., +ing, +s, +ness
Dimensions of Morphology
• “Complexity” of Words
• How many morphemes?
• Morphological Processes
• What functions do morphemes perform?
• Morpheme combination
• How do we put the morphemes together to form words?
Morphological process
Suppletion: where a word is completely replaced by
something that has no connection at the surface label.
Go to went.
Good to better
• Inflectional Languages
• Agglutinative Languages
Isolating languages
• Isolating languages do not (usually) have any bound morphemes
• Mandarin Chinese
• Gou bu ai chi qingcai (dog not like eat vegetable)
• This can mean one the the following (depending on the context)
• The dog doesn’t like to eat vegetables
• The dog didn’t like to eat vegetables
• The dogs don’t like to eat vegetables
• The dogs didn’t like to eat vegetables.
• Dogs don’t like to eat vegetables.
Inflectional Languages
• A single bound morpheme simultaneously conveys multiple pieces of
linguistic information.
• Refers to a process of word formation in which items are added to the base
form of a word to express grammatical meanings
• Latin
• For Example, transforms the
Noun - gulf
verb - engulf
Agglutinative Languages
• (Usually multiple) Bound morphemes are attached to one (or more)
free morphemes.
• Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian
• Swahili, Aymara
• Each morpheme (usually) encodes one "piece" of linguistic
information.
• Not more than one grammatical category.
Processing morphology
lemmatization: Word-> lemma
• Morpheme segmentation:
• De-nation-al-iz-ation
• Generation :
• See +past.verb = saw
Morphological Process
• There are essentially two types of morphological processes which
determine the functions of morphemes:
• Inflectional Morphology
• Derivational Morphology
Inflectional Morphology
• Inflection is the combination of a word stem with a grammatical
morpheme – Same class as the original stem.
• Ex : English as a inflectional morpheme –s for making plural on nouns.
-ed – Making the past tense on verb
• English has a relatively inflectional system – noun, verb and adjectives
can be infected.
• English noun – Two kinds of inflection
1. Plural
2. Possessive
Inflectional Morphology
• In English, only nouns, verbs, and sometimes adjectives can be
inflected, and the number of affixes is quite small.
• Inflections of nouns in English:
But the English inflection mainly concerned with the main and the
primary verbs, because both have inflectional ending.
Morphological forms of regular verbs