1. Morphology: Study of Words

2. Section 1
W.W.W.
Word Wide Web

3. What is a Word?
Thecatsonthemat

4. What is a Word?
“A single group of letters that
are used together with a
particular meaning.” (LDOCE)

5. One or Many Words?
Fly
fly
Noun flies
Fly
fly
Verb flying
flies
flew
flown

7. What is a Word?
Do you consider these as one
or many different words?
1. help
2. helps
3. helped
4. helping

8. What is a Word?
What about these?
• helpful
• helpline
• help box
• helping hand

9. What is a Word?
happy
likely
desirable
unhappy
unlikely
undesirable
If we assume that the most basic
unit of meaning is the word, what do
we say about the parts of words like
un-, which has a fixed meaning?

10. Word = A Single Piece of Meaning?
•
•
•
•
•
•
‘unfaithfulness’
‘laptop’
‘lap dog’
‘seaside’
‘sea shore’
‘it’s raining cats and dogs’

11. Words – fixed meaning?
Does the word ‘book’ have the same
meaning in these sentences?
• Reading books helps develop
personality.
• Please book a seat for me.
• Is my booking confirmed?
• My life is an open book.

12. Homophones
Sound alike – Different Meanings

13. Homonyms
Same Spelling – Different Meanings
• Why are movie stars so cool?
• Because they have so many fans!
• Why did the teacher wear sunglasses?
• Her students were too bright!
• Why did the king draw straight lines?
• Because he was the ruler!

14. Words – fixed meaning?
• Okay.
• Okay?
• Okay!
The meaning of a word may vary,
depending on its immediate context.
Meaning is also dependent on the
tone or stress.

15. So, What is a Word?
Linguists define words as “Language chunks
which recur as self-contained units and have
distinct syntactic behaviour.”
• I fly home tomorrow / I flew back yesterday
= same word
• Birds fly / The fly buzzed = 2 different
words
• I offered her a seat / She seated herself. =
same word

16. Knowing a Word
• Knowing its sound (pronunciation)
• Knowing its spelling (orthography)
• Knowing its meaning
[bear/bare - same sound but different
meanings so different words]
[sofa/couch - same meaning but
different words]

17. Knowing a Word
• Knowing its grammatical form (noun,
pronoun, verb etc.)
[I love you. / You are the love of my
life.]
• Knowing how to use a word.
[Respected Sir / Dear Sir]

19. Implications for Teaching
Work in groups of three and discuss
the implication of these ideas in
English language teaching.

20. Section 2
Morphology

21. What is Morphology?
• Morphology is the level of linguistic
study concerned with the internal
structure of words and rules of word
formation.
• It is concerned with the study of rules
governing the formation of words in
human language.
• A morpheme is the smallest meaningful
unit in the grammar of a language.

22. Cats
The word cats consists of two morphemes and
one syllable:
• cat, and -s, a plural marker for nouns.
Note that a morpheme like "-s" can just be a
single phoneme and does not have to be a
whole syllable.

23. Unladylike
The word unladylike consists of three morphemes
and four syllables. Morpheme breaks:
• un: 'not'
• lady: '(well behaved) female adult human’
• like: 'having the characteristics of'
None of these morphemes can be broken up any
more without losing all sense of meaning. Lady
cannot be broken up into "la" and "dy”, even
though "la" and "dy" are separate syllables. Note
that each syllable has no meaning on its own.

24. Technique
The word technique consists of only one
morpheme with two syllables. Even though the
word has two syllables, it is a single morpheme
because it cannot be broken down into smaller
meaningful parts.

26. What is a Morpheme?
 Count the number of morphemes in
the sentence:
Everyone enjoys teaching hard working
students.

27. Morphemic Analysis of Words
Every
one
enjoy s teach ing hard work
ing student s
I would like to thank every one of
you

28. Content Words and Function Words
Count the number of F’s in the following
sentence.
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF
SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
 One generally tends to note the ‘content’
words first.

29. Lexical Morphemes
Lexical morphemes (or ‘content words’)
are free morphemes that have
independent dictionary meaning of their
own.
These are all the words listed in dictionary
entries.
• race
• red
• reed

30. Grammatical Morphemes
Grammatical/Functional/Syntactic
morphemes are free morphemes.
Grammatical morphemes refers to words
such as a/an, the, some, that, on, in ,at, or,
but etc. which do not have an independent
meaning of their own.
These morphemes acquire a meaning only
when used with other free morphemes.

31. Grammatical Morphemes are also collocations,
fixed expressions or ‘chunks’ like these which do
not have independent meaning:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
However…
Nevertheless …
Despite…
In spite of…
In view of…
Instead of…
On the other hand…

33. Identify the Lexical and Function Words
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
reduced
inside
into
beside
besides
an
between
trouble
9. together
10.where
11.how
12.from
13.enjoy
14.John
15.mother

34. Free and Bound Morphemes

35. Free Morphemes
Free morphemes can stand on their
own and have a meaning.

36. Free Morphemes
• The following words are free morphemes:
school, student, boy, girl, child, teach, lecture
• Most free morphemes are content or lexical
words as they usually carry meaning.
However note the function words: is, has, on,
does, been

37. Bound Morphemes
Bound morphemes cannot stand on
their own, and make meaning. They
attach to a free morpheme to add
meaning.

38. Bound Morphemes
• The following are examples of ‘bound
morphemes’:
-ment, -en, -ing, -ed, -ness, -full, mis-, un-, -ly
• Bound morphemes can also be called
grammatical indicators because they can indicate
or change the grammatical behaviour of a word.
The word form with the correct bound
morpheme must be used depending on the
context and the position of the word.
Example: *The lecturer glad praised God.
×
The lecturer gladly praised God. √

39. Inflectional Bound Morphemes
Inflectional affixes perform
grammatical functions. They are added
at the end of a word to create new
words. Generally, they indicate:
Number: boy/boys
Tense: work/ works/worked/working
Comparison: hard/harder/hardest

40. Allomorphs
• Just like phonemes, morphemes also have
variants [different versions].
• Allomorphs are the variants of a morpheme.
• Allomorphs are a set of ‘morphs’ which
consist of different versions of the same
morpheme.
boy/boys, bus/buses, copy/copies, man/men
kill/killed, beg/begged, go/went
sing/singing, write/writing, run/running

41. Derivational Bound Morphemes
A derivational morpheme is a type of
bound morpheme which generates
new words by changing the class of
the word or forming new words.

42. Derivational Affixes
These affixes can alter the meaning of the
words to which they are attached.
-hood (child / childhood)
Shahrukh is my childhood friend. He is not a
child anymore.
-ex (wife / ex-wife)
Shahrukh’s wife is Gauri. He does not have an
ex-wife yet.

43. Derivational Affixes
Some derivational affixes can change
the function (or part of speech) of the
word to which they are attached.
entertain (V) entertainment (N)
correct (V) correction (N)
teach (V) teacher (N)
sad (N) sadly (Adv)
beauty (N) beautiful (Adj)

45. Use different forms of the word
‘entertain’ to complete the sentences.
1. My wife likes …………….. visitors at her house.
2. She is a good ………….. .
3. She …………. them to good food and ………….
music.
4. Cyberjaya is not a place for good …………… .

46. Use different forms of the word
‘entertain’ to complete the sentences.
1. My wife likes to entertain visitors at her
house.
2. She is a good entertainer.
3. She entertains them to good food and
entertaining music.
4. Cyberjaya is not a place for good
entertainment.

47. Derivational Bound Morphemes
1. Deriving Nouns from Verbs
Verb
Noun
break
breakage
revive
revival
explore
exploration
govern
government
inform
informant

48. Derivational Bound Morphemes
2. Adjectives from nouns
Noun
Adjective
care
careful
fruit
fruitless
love
lovable
friend
friendly
Malaysia
Malaysian

49. Derivational Bound Morphemes
3. Nouns from adjectives
Adjective
Noun
kind
kindness
rapid
rapidity
fragrant
fragrance
hostile
hostility

50. Derivational Bound Morphemes
4. Verbs from adjectives
Adjective
Verb
weak
weaken
solid
solidify

51. Derivational Bound Morphemes
5. Adjectives from verbs
Verb
Adjective
wash
washable
digest
digestive
satisfy
satisfactory
6. Verbs from nouns
Noun
Verb
special
specialise

52. Derivational Bound Morphemes
• They change the meaning or word class e.g.
govern + ment = government
• They indicate semantic relations in words e.g.
the morpheme –ful in hopeful and the
morpheme –less in waterless.
• The derivational bound morpheme operates in
a closed circuit kind of relationship. For
example, we cannot say *lookful or *milkless
• The derivational bound morpheme comes
before the inflectional morpheme. For example,
teach-er-s, hope-ful-s

54. Free and Bound Morphemes
• Identify the free and bound morphemes in
these words:
laptop seaside unfortunately saves
raining cats mismatch projector
• Think of at least ten words with the bound
morphemes at the beginning or at the end
of the words.

55. Word Formation

56. Affixation
Affixation is a morphological process of
attaching an affix to the root or base of a
word.
An affix is a type of ‘bound morpheme’
that is always attached to the root or base
of a word.

57. Prefix
A prefix is the type of affix that occurs
before the root or base of a word.
insensitive unkind impossible disable
• In• Un• Semi• Im• Dis-

58. Suffix
This is the type of affix that occurs
after the base or the root of a word.
teacher helpful boyish fatherhood
-er
-ful
-less
-ish
-hood

59. What are Root / Stem Words?
‘Root’ or ‘Stem’ is another term used for
describing free or bound morphemes. The root
word cannot be sub-divided and is combined with
‘bound’ morphemes to form new words.
improper (proper)
uninterrupted (interrupt)
permit/submit/admit (-mit)
economy/economic/economics (econom-)
Note: The ‘root’ does not always exist as a free
morpheme. Example – receive, reduce, repeat

60. Compound Words
A compound word consists of two or
more free morphemes:
textbook carry box lecture hall
wooden spoon
talking bird

61. Types of Compound Words
 Closed compounds (Words written together)
textbook
flowerpot
 Hyphenated compounds
merry-go-round
well-being
 Open compounds (Words written separately)
school bus
decision making
chocolate chip cookies

62. Compound- complex words
A compound-complex word is that which
consists of two or more free morphemes
and one or more bound morphemes.
• textbooks
• overtaken
• brother-in-law

64. Compound Words
Explain the possible meaning of the
compound words:
• old-furniture salesman
• old furniture salesman

65. Blending
Blending: similar to compounding, but
parts of the free morpheme involved are
lost
(Usually, 1st part of the 1st word + end of
the 2nd word)
• brunch (breakfast + lunch)
• motel (motor + hotel)
• smog (smoke + fog)
• newscast (news + broadcast)

67. Blending
Work in groups of three and think of some
blends in English and Malay.
 chexting, camcorder, emoticon, globish,
infotainment, mopad, sitcom, telegenic
cerpen, tadika ….

68. Clipping: Shortening of a longer free
morpheme
•
•
•
•
•
•
auto
lab
bike
sub
ad
porn
•
•
•
•
•
•
Prof
Doc
Kathy
Liz
Ron
condo

69. Reduplication
Reduplication: Full or partial repetition of a free
morpheme; sometimes with a variation
• so-so
• bye-bye
• dilly-dally
• zigzag
• mishmash

70. Word Coinage
Completely New Words
• aspirin, nylon, kleenex, teflon, zipper
• google, pooch, facebook
Extensions of existing words
• hamburger: cheese burger, veggie burger, fish
burger, tofu burger
• broadcast: telecast, webcast
• marathon: walkathon, talkathon, danceathon
• alcoholic: workaholic
• seminar: webinar

71. Word Borrowing
A language may borrow from another language,
words for which there are no equivalents in it.
These may be words for objects, social, political,
and cultural institutions and events or abstract
concepts which are not found in the culture of
that language.

72. Word Borrowing
Historically, English has borrowed tremendously
from other languages.
- alcohol (Arabic)
- boss (Dutch)
- croissant (French)
- lilac (Persian)
- piano (Italian)
- pretzel (German)
- robot (Czech)
- tycoon (Japanese)
- yogurt (Turkish)
- zebra (Bantu)

73. Loan Words
Direct translation of the elements of a word into
the borrowing language.
• English – technology
• Malay – teknologi
• English – computer
• Malay – komputer
• English – boyfriend
• Chinese – nan pengyu
• Malay – teman lelaki

74. Acronyms
Acronyms abbreviate (shorten) a longer term by
taking the initial letters.
A. Follow pronunciation: NATO, TOFEL, AIDS,
MUET, UNESCO
B. If unpronounceable, say each letter: ATM, IQ,
MRT, MTV, CD, UFO, SMS
C. Sound out each letter to avoid confusion:
WHO, UNO (Note – PIN number)