REFLECTION WEEK 5 (MORPHOLOGY)

Morphology

Franklin et. al (2007:77) stated that morphology is the study of the internal structure of words an of the rules by which words are formed.

This week, I learned about morphology. After some reading, I found out that, morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog catcher are closely related. Most of English speakers know the relationship between word formation in English from the previous knowledge.

Beside get to know about morphology, I also learned about morpheme. The morpheme is very familiar but I always forget its meaning. Actually, we have learned about it during our foundation but it was in Malay. Therefore, I do have some basic knowledge about it. Morpheme is the smallest unit of grammatical analysis / function.

From what we have learnt morpheme can be divided into monomorphemic, dimorphemic and polymorphemic words. Monomorphemic words are word with one morpheme. For example, we, us, they, are, is, am and so on. As for dimorphemic are words which have two morphemes. For example, com + ing, go + ing, paint + er. Meanwhile, polymorphemic words are those with more than one morpheme. For example, uncomfortable, industrial, inconvenient and so on. I never thought that English do have such rules for I thought only Bahasa Melayu uses it.

In morpheme itself, it consists of free and bound morpheme, allomorphs, inflectional and derivational morphology. This week, we look more into free and bound morpheme. Free morphemes are morphemes which can stand on their own have their own grammatical function like adjective, verb and noun. For instance, like which the grammatical function is as verb. As for bound morphemes, they are morphemes which cannot stand on their own because it needs to be combined with other morpheme to form a word with new meaning. For example, “unlikely”. The original word is “like” where “un” and “ly” are the bound morpheme which is attached to it to form a new word with new meaning. But, bound morphemes do have grammatical function. For example, ‘un’ which shows negation.

Morpheme type	Structure
root	simple, made up of a single morpheme; a basis for compounding and affixation
stem	may be complex, made up of one or more morphemes; a basis for affixation
affix prefix infix suffix suprafix simulfix circumfix	simple

Meanwhile for allomorph, this is the first time I heard of this word. It refers to a variant of a morpheme. It occurs due to the phonological and lexical conditioning. Phonological conditioning is of the surrounding sounds in the voiced and voiceless feature of the phoneme before the morpheme. Voiceless morpheme will produce voiceless allomorph and vice versa. The example of allomorphs is /s/, /t/ and /d/. As for the lexical conditioning, it includes all the past tense. For example, “take” – “took”.

The other one is the zero allomorphs which has no addition or subtraction of its part although the meaning has change. For example “sheep” (singular), “sheep” (plural). Besides, zero allomorph also happens indicating masculine or feminine gender. For example, lawyer.

The more I learned about morphology, the more I understand about it. I need further information in order to get to know more about morphology. I think it is fun to learn about morphology. I can’t wait to learn about tree diagram.

* Some note about morphology, click here.