Morphology background and history

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2. Topic;
Morphology
Presented to:
Dr ADNAN TAHIR
Presented by:
MUHAMMAD AFZAL
RIPHAH International University, FSD
Campus

3. Outlines:
Introduction of morphology
Historical development of Morphology
What is Morpheme
Basic concept of word structure
Classification of Morpheme
Difference among Morph, Morpheme and
Allomorphs

4. Morphology
Word Morphology has GREEK origin and consists of two
words.
Morphology
Morph + ology
(Form or shape) (study of)
So, morphology means the study of the
internal structure of the words.

5. It is the sub field of linguistics
It deals with;
How words are constructed out of smaller units(morphemes)
-which have a meaningful or grammatical function
Ex.
Word friendly consist of two morphemes
Friend +ly=> friendly
How words can be modified.

6. Historical Development of
Morphology
Started from Ancient India by Panini in 6
th
century BC from Sanskrit
language.
Panini formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in text
Astadhyayi.
The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also took interest in
Arabic morphology
In 1786 sir William Jones claimed that Sanskrit, Latin, Persian and
Germanic were descended from common ancestor.

7. In 1899, under the
influence of Darwinian
Theory of evolution, Max
Mullerdelivered his
lectures in Oxford that
the study of the
evolution of words
illuminated the evolution
of language just as in
biology morphology.
He claimed that 400-500
basic roots on Indo-
European ancestors of
many of the languages
of Europe and Asia was
the key to understanding
the origin of human
language.

8. August Schleicher
He was German
linguist who
coined the
linguistic term
“Morphology" in
1859.

9. Morphology
Morphology deals with the internal constituent structure of words as
well
The study of the structure of words & how words are formed (from
morphemes)
Morphology is the study and description of word formation (as
inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language

11. Morpheme
A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function is called morpheme.
It is a meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a
word element, such as -edin walked, that cannot be divided into smaller
meaningful parts
It is a smallest morphological unit that cannot be divided into smaller parts.
Example;
re-open –ed => consist of three morphemes
re open ed
minimal unit of meaning minimal unit of meaning minimal unit of grammatical function

13. Basic concept of word structure.
The number, order and type of morphemes used to make up a
particular word is called structure.
Morphologist study;
1. The meaning of various morphemes
2. Their pattern of distribution { structure}
Morphemes do not combine in arbitrary ways. They have
specific pattern.
e.g. rewrite not write re and walks not s walk

14. Classification of morpheme
There are two types of morphemes:
Free Morpheme
Bound Morpheme

15. Free Morpheme
A morpheme that can stand by itself and gives a single
meaning is known as free morpheme.
Examples; book, talk, open
They can stand by themselves because of they already had a
meaning. So that’s why they are categorized as the free
morphemes.
Free morphemes fall into two categories. They are;
Lexical morpheme
Functional Morpheme

16. Lexical Morpheme
Morphemes that carry the content or meaning of the messages that we are
conveying. In order to identify alexicalmorpheme, ask yourself this: “If this
morpheme was deleted, would I not be able to understand the main message
of this sentence?” If the answer is yes, then you have alexicalmorpheme. They
conveyed the main message of the sentence.
Lexical Morpheme consists on ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs.
For example:
Noun : Tree, Woman, Bottle, Chair etc
Adjective : Good, Great, Bad, Worst etc
Verb : Leave, Go, Write, talk, read etc
They are called open class of the word. We can add new lexical morpheme
to the language.

17. Functional Morpheme
Morphemes that do not carry the content of a message, but rather help the grammar
of the sentencefunction.
These free morphemes can be identified by asking yourself this question: “If this
morpheme was deleted, would I still be able to understand the main message of this
sentence?” If the answer is yes, then you have afunctionalmorpheme.
Functional words in the language such as conjunction, preposition, articles and
pronoun are functional morphemes
Examples:
Conjunctions : Although, As, Before, Because, etc
Prepositions : Next, On, Under, Toward, etc
Articles : A, An and The
Pronouns : I, You, We, They, She, He, it ,etc
They are called closed class of words, we never add new functional morpheme to
the language.

18. Bound Morphemes
Bound Morphemes are morphemes that can’t normally stand alone and typically
need free morphemes to stand.
Bound morphemes have no linguistic meaning unless they are connected to a root
or base word, or in some cases, another bound morpheme. Prefixesandsuffixes are
two types of bound morphemes. Ex. ed, re, s, etc.
When free morpheme are used with bound morpheme, the basic word form
involved is technically known as the “stem”
This process of adding a morpheme to a word to form a new word is called
“Affixation”. If morpheme is added before the word than it is called “Prefixes”. If
morpheme is added after the word than it is called “Suffixes”
Examples:
Un -happy care -less -ness
prefix stem stem suffix suffix
(Bound) (free) (free) (bound) (bound)

19. Bound Morpheme
Bound morphemes are further divided into two types;
Derivational morpheme
Inflectional morpheme

20. Derivational Morpheme
Derivational morphemes are those bound morphemes that we use in making new
words or making words of different grammatical categories from the stem.
Derivational morphemes transform words into different grammatical categories from
the root word (a free morpheme).
In order to identify a derivational morpheme, ask yourself this question: “If this
morpheme was added, would it change the part of speech of this word?” If the answer
is yes, then you have a derivational morpheme.
Examples:
 Good (Adjective)+ -ness (derivational morpheme)
=> goodness (Noun)
 Care (noun)+ -ful(derivational morpheme)
=> careful (adjective)
A list of derivational morphemes includes:
 Suffixes: -ish, -less, -ly,etc.
 Prefixes: re-, pre-,un-,ex-, mis-, co, etc.

21. Inflectional Morpheme
Inflectional morphemes are those morphemes that are used to indicate the
aspects of grammatical function of the words. They do not change
grammatical category of the words.
Inflectional morphemes are not used to make a new words in language just
indicate grammatical aspects of the words.
Such as changing a word into a plural or possessive form.
Plural makers, possessive makers, tense makers, comparative makers and
superlative makers are called inflectional morphemes.
Noun + -s, ‘s (Plural+ Possessive Markers)
Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en (Tense Markers)
Adjective + -est, -er (Degree markers)
Examples:
 Boy + (s) => Boys ( s shows plural marker)
 Clean + (ed) => Cleaned (edshows past tense)
 Ali + (‘s) => Ali’s (‘s shows possessive marker)
 Tall + (er) => Taller (ershows degree marker)

22. Diagram of Morphemes
Morpheme
Free Morpheme Bound Morpheme
Lexical functional Derivational Inflectional
morpheme morpheme morpheme morpheme
Nouns, Adjectives conjunction, preposition Affixes plural markers => -s
Verbs pronoun, Articles prefixes, suffixes Tense Markers =>-s, -
ed, -ing, etc
Degree Markers => -er, -est
Possessive Markers = ‘s

23. Morphs, Morpheme and
Allomorphs:
Morph is the physical form through which a morpheme is represented.
Morph is simply the phonetic representation of morpheme, which study
the unit of form, sounds and phonetic symbol.
Morpheme is the smallest contrastive unit of meaningful and grammatical
function in language. It is the smallest meaningful unit of a word.
Example:
 Word “People” consists of one Morph and two Morphemes.
 People 1 morph => 2 morphemes (people + pl)
This word has one actual written from but gives us two meanings
one is people and other is plural

24. Morphs, Morpheme and
Allomorphs;
Word “People” consists of two morpheme while one morph.
 People + Plural => 1+zero morpheme =>2 morphemes
Zero morpheme has no physical form.
In this way each morph is morpheme but each morpheme is not morph
A morpheme which has no phonological representation is called zero morpheme.
Example:
 Went => 1 morph = 2morphemes
 Go + past tense features

25. Categories of Morphs
Morphs can be divided into two important categories:
Lexical Morphs
Grammatical Morphs
Lexical morph is the morph that denotes directly objects actions,
qualities and other pieces of real word
Example : table, dog, walk, etc.
Grammatical morph is the morph that has been modifyingthe
meaning of the lexical morphs by adding a certain element to them.
Example : un-, -able, re-, -d, in-, -ent, -ly, -al, -ize, -a-, -tion, anti-, dis-,
-ment, -ari-, -an, -ism

26. Morphs, Morpheme and
Allomorphs:
Allomorphs
Allomorph is the different forms of the same morpheme or basic
unit of meaning.
The variant forms of one morpheme are called allomorphs of that
morpheme.
These can be different pronunciation or different spellings
Example:
S as in “Judges”
Z as in “Dogs”
IZ as in “Boxes”
Plural morpheme in English is usually written as “S”. In above words
one plural morpheme which is written as “S” is represented in variant
forms. These are called allomorphs of one plural morpheme.

27. Five online lectures links;
1.https://youtu.be/mv7t6Q0uebY
2.https://youtu.be/TqAtAqGqU28
3.https://youtu.be/FaGelYAI0lA
4.https://youtu.be/zQ81ypnnMHo
5.https://youtu.be/oqO3zKxSeGE

28. FIVE Research Articles;
1. Effects of Morphological Levels on Understanding Meaning of Words in English
published in 2019 by YoussifZaghwaniOmar (PhD)
2. Effects of morphological awareness on second language vocabulary knowledge
published in 2017 by FatmaDemirayAkbuluta
3. ANALYTICAL COMPONENTS OF MORPHOLOGY IN LINGUISTICS publshedin 2015
by Dr. George Kolanchery
4. Gendered associations of English morphology published in 2018 by Jeremy M.
Needle1 and Janet B. Pierrehumbert2
5. Are Morphological Awareness and Literacy Skills Reciprocally Related? Evidence
From a Cross-Linguistic Study published in 2019 by George Manolitsis

29. Four International Journals name;
1.JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES
international journal on language and linguistic
chief editor
2.Associations of English morphology. Laboratory
Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory
3.Global English-Oriented Research Journal
4.Proceedings of the Society for Computation in
Linguistics

30. Introduction of THREE International
Conferences;
8th International Conference on Phonology and Morphology. Held in South Korea,
June 26-27, 2020
Short Title: ICPM8 (http://www.phonology.or.kr)
17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology,
and Morphology
Short Title: SIGMORPHON. Will be held in July 10, 2020 Washington USA
https://sigmorphon.github.io/workshops/2020/
16th Fachtagungof the Society for Indo-European Studies: “Beyond Formenlehre?
Indo-European Morphology with fuzzy boundaries and interface phenomena” Will be
held 07-Sep-2020 -Zurich, Switzerland
(https://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/de/16.-Fachtagung-der-
Indogermanischen-Gesellschaft.html)