Lecture 3. Morphology for Osher Program

2. Morphology
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling

3. What is a Morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar
of a language.

4. Morphemes Can Be Free or Bound
Free: Bound:
Read Reader,
Polite Impolite
Cover recover
Morphemes – er – re- and – im- are bound because
they do not exist as separate words.
Morphemes and Allomorphs

5. Not all bound morphemes are affixes!
• I would like to record this lecture.
• He listened to his favorite record.
Stress is the bound morpheme!
• Give-gave
• Blow-blew
The vowel change is the bound morpheme!

6. Morphemes have allomorphs just as phonemes
have allophones
--a-- and --an-- are the allomorphs of the indefinite article:
a dog but an apple
--as-- or --es-- ending in Spanish verbs:
tú hablas or tú comes
Some languages have only FREE morphemes (Vietnamese)
These languages are isolating or analytic.
In some languages most morphemes are bound and each has
a separate meaning.
These languages are agglutinative (Swahili)
European languages are fusional (their bound morphemes
often carry more than one meaning.)

7. Affixes Can Be Inflectional or Derivational
Worker
Neonatal
Useful
Politeness
Inflectional affixes add
grammatical information to
already existing words.
There are only 8 inflections in
English:
Derivational affixes attach to a
morpheme or a word to derive
a new word.
•Possessive –s- (Mary’s book
•Plural –s- (books)
•3rd. person singular –s- (walks, talks)
•Past tense –ed- (walked)
•Present participle –ing- (walking, driving)
•Past participle –ed/-en (has walked, have driven)
•Comparative –er- (taller)
•Superlative –est- (tallest)
Why Plural “s”?

8. Wilhelm von Humboldt
• identified human language as a
rule-governed system.
• was the first to classify languages
morphologically.
• founded Berlin University.
• created Prussian Education
System.
• studied the Basque Language.
• translated Aeschylus into German.
• laid foundations of Noam
Chomsky's theory of language.
(1767-1835)

9. Types of Word Formation
• Compounding: steamboat, restroom
• Neologisms (coining): hacker, login
• Eponyms: boycott, casanova
• Blends: apathetic; brunch; scroll
• Conversions: mother, parent (as verbs)
• Clipping: bro, math, lab, sub
• Acronyms: SARS, NASA, AIDS
• Backformation: edit, scavenge
• Reduplication: knock-knock; bye bye

10. Eponyms: What Do We Know about These People?
Badminton, cardigan, limousine, tuxedo, zeppelin,
Starbucks, derringer, volt, quisling, hollandaise,
forsythia, Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima.
•Eponyms
Could you name some more?

11. Borrowings from Other Languages
Germanic
Languages 26%
Old/Middle English
(Old Norse, Dutch)
French 29%
Include Anglo-French
Latin 29%
Derived from Proper Names 4%
The History of English

12. How Were the Words Borrowed?
“Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's
language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and
sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty
is its vitality.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Round House
How did English Evolve?
The Love Story of English and French

13. Samuel Johnson
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than
he has read.
1709-1784

14. Noah Webster
 One of the Founding Fathers.
 An American Dictionary of the English
Language.
 Advocate for American textbooks.
 The author of Blue Backed Speller.
 learned 28 languages.
 introduced new spelling of some words.
(1758-1843)