Morphology: Exploring types of Morphemes, Morphological Analysis, Word Formation and Lexical Structure in Linguistics

Morphology:

It is one of the micro-branches of linguistics that deals with word formation processes and it also deals with the smallest units of words called morphemes to describe how they can be put together to form words.

Morpheme:

A morpheme is the smallest unit in a language that has meaning and serves grammatical function. It can alter the meaning or part of speech of a word and create a new word.

Types of Morphemes:

Free Morphemes:

Free Morphemes are the words that can be used on their own without the help of affixes. Free Morphemes are further divided into two sub-categories: Lexical and Functional. Lexical morphemes are the contentful words that we use. Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs, and Adverbs fall under this category. It is also called Open-class, because we can add new words to this category. The second sub-category is functional, which contains words that do not have contentful meaning. They are also called Closed Class, because we can not add any more words to this class. The functional sub-category includes: Pronouns, Determiners, Conjunctions, and Prepositions.

Bound Morphemes:

Bound Morphemes can not be used independently. They require a free morpheme. Bound Morphemes are also sub-divided into two categories: Derivational and Inflectional. Derivational morphemes are the affixes that we add to the start or end of the words to create new words.

Inflectional morphemes is the other sub-category of bound morpheme. Inflectional morphemes  only indicate the grammatical information of the words. There are only eight inflectional morphemes in the English Language: third person singular "s", plural "s", possessive " 's", past tense -ed, past participle -en, comparative degree of adjectives -er, superlative degree of adjectives -est, and "-ing" suffix, which is used at the end of verbs.

Lexicon:

Lexicon is described as the mental vocabulary that every speaker of a language has in his or her mind in order to communicate.

It not only contains the words, but it also contains the information such as meaning, pronunciation, and syntactic category of the words.

Lexeme:

A lexeme is an abstract term used for the vocabulary that is stored in the minds of the speakers of that language. It is written in small capital letters in books as a convention.

For example: BOOK, BOY, CAT, DOG, FLY, DRUM.

Etymology:

Etymology is defined as the history and origin of a word. It tells us exactly from which language a specific word came, and it also tells us how it was used in that language. In English, most words are borrowed from Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and German. However, there are other languages as well from which English borrow words.

Morphological Analysis:

In morphological analysis, we investigate how complex words are put together with the help of affixes.

For examples:

Observation:

It is made up of one base, observe, and one suffix, -ation. If we analyze it further, we find that the base "observe" can further be broken into serve, which is called root word.

Undesirable:

This word is made up of desire, which is the base and root word as well, since it can not be further broken down into any more meaningful word. The affixes attached to this word are Un-, which is a prefix, and -able, which is a suffix.

Activity:

Activity comes from active, which is the base word, and it can further be broken into act, which is the root word. The word activity has one infix, -ive, and one suffix attached to it, -ity.

Morphological productivity is the measurement of an affix in regards to how flexible it is. It is also called creativity by Noam Chomsky. Moreover, if a prefix or a suffix is more flexible in attaching to different words then it is called more productive. Whereas, if a prefix or a suffix is not that flexible in attaching to different words then it is called less productive.

The suffix -er is the most productive suffix in English language. In contrast, -id suffix is the least productive.