4.1 The Meaning of Morphology
CHAPTER 4
MORPHOLOGY
A. THE MEANING OF MORPHOLOGY
In linguistic, morphology is a branch of knowledge that
concern to study about word formation or morpheme of a
language. According to crystal (1980:232-233), morphology is a
branch of grammar that studies the structure or the form of
words, particularly through the use morpheme. In general,
morphology is divided into two field : the study of inflection
(Inflectional morphology) and the study of word formation
(lexical or derivational morphology).
Morphology is the study of words. Morphemes are the minimal units of words that have a meaning and cannot be subdivided further. There are two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can occur alone and bound morphemes must occur with another morpheme. An example of a free morpheme is "bad", and an example of a bound morpheme is "ly." It is bound because although it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be attached to another morpheme to produce a word.
Free morpheme: bad
Bound morpheme: -ly
Word: badly
When we talk about words, there are two groups: lexical (or content) and function (or grammatical) words. Lexical words are called open class words and include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. New words can regularly be added to this group. Function words, or closed class words, are conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns; and new words cannot be (or are very rarely) added to this class.
in linguistics, study of the internal construction of words. Languages vary widely in the degree to which words can be analyzed into word elements, or morphemes (q.v.). In English there are numerous examples, such as “replacement,” which is composed of re-, “place,” and -ment, and “walked,” from the elements “walk” and -ed.
There are two categories of affixes: derivational and inflectional. The main difference between the two is that derivational affixes are added to morphemes to form new words that may or may not be the same part of speech and inflectional affixes are added to the end of an existing word for purely grammatical reasons. In English there are only eight total inflectional affixes:
Morphology includes the grammatical processes of inflection (q.v.) and derivation. Inflection marks categories such as person, tense, and case; e.g., “sings” contains a final -s, marker of the 3rd person singular. Derivation is the formation of new words from existing words; e.g., “singer” from “sing” and “acceptable” from “accept.” Derived words can also be inflected: “singers” from “singer.”
Affixes are often the bound morpheme. This group includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes. Prefixes are added to the beginning of another morpheme, suffixes are added to the end, infixes are inserted into other morphemes, and circumfixes are attached to another morpheme at the beginning and end.
For instance, the words "plays", "played" and "playing" belong to the lexeme "play". "Plays" can be reduced to the morphemes "play" and "-s"; "played" to the morphemes "play" and "-ed"; and "playing" to the morphemes "play" and "-ing". The formation of words like "plays", "played" and "playing" from the lexeme "play", through a process known as inflection, is the focus of morphology. Finally, it is worth noting that certain lexemes can be further reduced to their constitutive morphemes. For instance, "constitute" and "constitution" are different lexemes, since they are both word units with their own individual content meanings. Within the study of morphology, the lexeme "constitution" can be further reduced to two morphemes, these being "constitute" and the derivational suffix "-ion". Stem or root words, suffixes, and prefixes are morphological features in linguistics, and together they make up the structure of words.