WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY?

A. Introducing Morphology

Morphology from Greek: Study of shape

B. Importance of Studying Morphology.

1. Decoding: Readers who recognized morphemes read more quickly and accurately.

2. Vocabulary: Knowledge of meaning of word parts expands reader’s vocabulary.

3. Comprehension: Knowledge of morphemes will make easier understanding the meaning of  text.

4. Spelling: Morphemes are units that can be predictably spelled.

C. What Is Morphology?

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the structure of words. Morphology deals with the syntax of complex words and parts of word, also called morphemes, as well as with the semantics of their lexical meanings. Understanding how words are formed and what semantic properties they convey through their form enables human beings to easily recognize individual words and their meanings in discourse.

In English and many other languages, many words can be broken down into parts. For example:

Unbelievable	Un-believe-able
Dogs	Dog-s
Reading	Read-ing
Wanted	Want-ed
Undo	Un-do

D. Why Do Languages Have Morphology?

Because morphology differs from morphological typology which is the classification of languages based on their use of words and how they make up a language vocabulary.

Categories: changing lexeme formulation.

Meaning: happy-unhappy (adjective).

Both: wash-washable (verb-adjective).

E. What Is Word? 

Someone might say that a word is a stretch of letters that occurs between blank spaces. But someone else is bound to point out that words do not have to be written for people to know that they were words, and in spoken language, there are no spaces or pauses to delineate words. Yet people know what they are. Still another person might at this point try an answer like this: “A word is something small that means something,” to which a devil’s advocate might respond, “But what do you mean by ‘something small’?” This is the point at which it becomes necessary to define a few specialized linguistic terms. 

Linguists define a morpheme as the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning. Simple words like giraffe, wiggle, or yellow are morphemes, but so are prefixes like re- and pre- and suffixes like -ize and -er. There is far more to be said about morphemes – as the reader will see in later chapters of this paper – but for now the reader can use the term morpheme to help people come up with a more precise and coherent definition of word. Now let define a word as one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language. Word is consist only one morpheme.

F. Word Lexemes, Type and Token

How many words occur in the following sentence?

My friend and I walk to class together, because our classes are in the same building and we dislike walking alone. 

It is useful to have some special terms for how people count words. Let’s say that if people are counting every instance in which a word occurs in a sentence, regardless of whether that word has occurred before or not, people are counting word tokens. If people count word tokens in the sentence above, they count 21. If, however, they are counting a word once, no matter how many times it occurs in a sentence, they are counting word types.  

Counting this way, they count 20 types in the sentence above: the two tokens of the word and count as one type. A still different way of counting words would be to count what are called lexemes. Lexemes can be thought of as families of words that differ only in their grammatical endings or grammatical forms; singular and plural forms of a noun (class, classes), present, past, and participle forms of verbs (walk, walks, walked, walking), different forms of a pronoun (I, me, my, mine) each represent a single lexeme. One way of thinking about lexemes is that they are the basis of dictionary entries; dictionaries typically have a single entry for each lexeme. So if people are counting lexemes in the sentence above, they would count class and classes, walk and walking, I and my, and our and we as single lexemes; the sentence then has 16 lexemes. 

G. But is it really a word?

In some sense people now know what words are – or at least what word types, word tokens, and lexemes are. But there is another way people can ask the question “What is a word?” Consider the sort of question they might ask when playing Scrabble: “Is aalii a word?” Or when they encounter an unfamiliar word: “Is bouncebackability a word?” What they were asking when they answer questions like these, is really the question “Is xyz a REAL word?” People first impulse in answering those questions is to run for their favorite dictionary; if it is a real word it ought to be in the dictionary. 

But think about this answer for just a bit, and they will begin to wonder if it makes sense. Who determines what goes in the dictionary in the first place? What if dictionaries differ in whether they list a particular word? For example, the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary lists aalii but not bouncebackability. The Oxford English Dictionary On-Line does not list aalii, but it does list bouncebackability. So which one is right? Further, what about words like cot potato or freshmore that do not occur in any published dictionary yet, but can be encountered in the media? 

The former, according to Word Spy means a baby who spends too much time watching television (Americans might use the term crib potato instead of cot potato), and the latter is a second-year high school student in the US who has to repeat a lot of first-year classes, and what about the word cot potatodom? Once people know what a cot potato is, they have no trouble understanding the new word. If it consists of morphemes, has a meaning, and can stand alone, does not it qualify as a word according to their definition even if it does not appear in the dictionary?

What all these questions suggest is that people each have a mental lexicon, a sort of internalized dictionary that contains an enormous number of words that they can produce, or at least understand when they hear them, but they also have a set of word formation rules which allows them to create new words and understand new words when they encounter them.