I learned about morphology for topic 3. I always wondered, how was a new word in English was formed before. When our lecturer told us about this topic, I did some research in the internet about morphology.
According to Dr. C. George Boeree, morphology is the study of morphemes, obviously and morphemes are words, word stems, and affixes, basically the unit of language one up from phonemes. For me, morphology is the studied of the word structure and its rules and also how the word was formed. Morpheme is the minimal unit of grammatical function.
During lecture, I learned about two types of morpheme which are bound and free morpheme. Free morphemes are the same as words and they can stand alone. Examples are cold, cuts, dog's, best, needs and smiles. Bound morphemes cannot stand alone and they always have to be attached to another morpheme. Examples are -s as in cuts, dogs, papers, or coops or -ed as in burned and tried.
| MORPHEMES | |||||
| BOUND | FREE | ||||
| · Cannot stand alone and they always have to be attached to another morpheme · Examples are -s as in cuts, dogs, papers, or coops or -ed as in burned and tried. | · the same as words and they can stand alone · Examples are cold, cuts, dog's, best, needs and smiles | ||||
| AFFIX | ROOT | OPEN CLASS (CONTENT OR LEXICAL WORDS) | CLOSED CLASS (FUNCTION OR GRAMMATICAL WORDS) | ||
| · A morpheme that comes at the beginning (prefix) or the ending (suffix) of a base morpheme. · An affix usually is a morpheme that cannot stand alone · Examples: -ful, -ly, -ity, -ness, mis-, un-, etc. | · A unit of meaning (morpheme) · Examples : Cats, Fish | · Nouns · Verbs · Adverbs · Adjectives | · Conjunctions · Prepositions · Articles · Pronouns · Auxiliary verbs | ||
| DERIVATIONAL | INFLECTIONAL | ||||
| · Changes the meaning of the word or the part of speech or both. · Often create new words. · Example: the prefix and derivational morpheme un added to invited changes the meaning of the word. | · This morpheme can only be a suffix. · The s in cats is an inflectional morpheme. · An inflectional morpheme creates a change in the function of the word. · Example: the d in invited indicates past tense. · English has only seven inflectional morphemes: -s (plural) and -s (possessive) are noun inflections; -s ( 3rd-person singular), -ed ( past tense), -en (past participle), and -ing ( present participle) are verb inflections; -er (comparative) and -est (superlative) are adjective and adverb inflections. | ||||
| PREFIX | SUFFIX | SUFFIX | | | |
| · An affix that comes before a base morpheme. · The in in the word inspect is a prefix | · An affix that comes after a base morpheme. · The s in cats is a suffix. | · An affix that comes after a base morpheme. · The s in cats is a suffix. | | | |
I also learned about allomorphs. Allomorph is a linguistics term for a variant form of morpheme. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, an allomorph is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme. The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound (phonologically) without changing meaning. It is used in linguistics to explain the comprehension of variations in sound for a specific morpheme. The Plural morpheme in English has different sound-form for example
1. Dogs - /dogz/
2. Cats - /kaets/
3. Churches - / tʃərtʃəz/
In English, a past tense morpheme is -ed. It occurs in several allomorphs depending on its phonological environment, assimilating voicing of the previous segment or inserting a schwa when following an alveolar stop:
1. as /əd/ or /ɪd/ in verbs whose stem ends with the alveolar stops /t/ or /d/, such as 'hunted' /hʌntəd/ or 'banded' /bændəd/
2. as /t/ in verbs whose stem ends with voiceless phonemes other than /t/, such as 'fished' /fɪʃt/
3. as /d/ in verbs whose stem ends voiced phonemes other than /d/, such as 'buzzed' /bʌzd/
Other types of allomorphs are also the result of lexical conditioning such as:
1. drink – drunk
2. run – ran
3. eat – ate
4. sing – sang
5. stand – stood
6. sleep – slept
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, in morpheme-based morphology, a null allomorph or zero allomorph is a special kind of allomorph which has the form of a null morpheme. Because there are contexts in which the underlying morpheme still appears in the surface structure, a "real" null morpheme could be re-defined as a morpheme which never occurs in the surface representation of words. The phenomenon itself is known as null allomorphy or total morpheme blocking. An example of null allomorphy in English is the phrase two fish-Ø which can also be two fish-es.
For tutorial task 3, we had to prepare language games on word formation. Our group plan a simple games that asked student to form a new word. We showed them a root word such as happy and they added prefix and suffix to the word. The student worked in group and they had to discuss the word. Then, they wrote the word on mini white board. The group that wrote many words and had meaning won the game. The actually can be improved by deducting the marks for the wrong words. I really attracted to Mamora’s group games. The game was simple but fun. The student can build up a new word and they had to think on the sport. Actually word can be formed or expanded by the various morphological processes possible in a language such as affixation, compounding, reduplication, clipping, acronymy and other minor process such as blending, onomatopoeia and antonomasia.
For me, this topic helped me to improve my vocabulary. It prepared me to teach English. As an English teacher, I have to bring dictionary everytime I go to the class. Beside, I also have to know the topic well before I entered the class. If I wanted to use game during lesson, I need to prepare a simple instructions and I also can modified the game during teaching. Actually, word game can attract student t study well.
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