Morphology

I

Introduction

Morphology, branch of grammar that focuses on the study of the internal structure of words. Languages can be divided into synthetic, or inflecting (such as English, German, or Turkish), and analytic, or isolating (such as Chinese and Vietnamese). Whereas grammatical functions and relations in isolating languages depend mainly on word order, the words themselves being invariable in form, in inflecting languages the words can change their form, function, and meaning, usually by adding extra syllables or affixes to the root or stem of the word. The smallest, separable element of a word that carries meaning is called a morpheme. Languages such as English make extensive use of a moderate range of different morphemes in forming words, while languages such as Turkish and Swahili are able to form words consisting of long strings of morphemes, each of which alters the meaning of the word. Such languages are generally called agglutinating. Polysynthetic languages, such as languages from the Eskimo family and Mohawk, have very long, complex words that have a mixture of agglutinating and synthetic features.

There are three kinds of affixes: prefixes, which precede the stem of the word; suffixes, which follow it; and infixes, which are added within the stem. Prefixes and suffixes are common in English, but infixes are only found in playful constructions such as abso-bleedin'-lutely.

Morphology is of two basic kinds: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphology refers to the use of morphemes to change grammatical function, such as the suffix -ed in the word walked, indicating the past tense of a verb, or the suffix -s in books, to indicate the plural of a noun. Derivational morphology, on the other hand, is concerned with the use of morphemes to alter meaning, such as the prefix re- in rebirth, or the suffix -able in changeable, for example.

Of course, not all morphemes are as clear-cut and regular as the ones in those examples. Irregular plural forms such as feet or children make it harder to define what a morpheme is, or, for instance, to explain rode as the past tense of ride in terms of morphemes. A morpheme, therefore, cannot be defined as a syllable, or even a single sound, in all cases. Sometimes sound changes within the stem take the place of additional syllables or sounds. Furthermore, the same morpheme in writing may have different forms in speech: -ed in helped (a voiceless /t/) is not pronounced the same way as the -ed in jabbed (a voiced /d/) or in raided (/id/); the articulation of the morpheme changes in accordance with the final sound of the stem. Morphemes do not just vary phonologically. The morpheme –ed can be said to express past tense, but in irregular verb forms past tense is expressed in different ways, as in English said or lay for example. Variant forms like these of a morpheme are known as allomorphs.

In other languages we find still further complications. For instance, in some of the tone languages (that is, languages where variation in tone also varies the meaning of a word) of West Africa, the morpheme may consist either of a change of tone, an affix, or a combination of the two. By contrast, the definition of the morpheme in a Semitic language such as Arabic, where the pattern of consonants and vowels relates to the function of the word, is necessarily somewhat different to the definition as it applies to Indo-European languages: for example 'ahmaru (red) (masculine), hamrā'u (feminine), humrun (plural).

A more detailed definition of the morpheme, then, is as the smallest contrastive unit in the grammar of a language; that is, the smallest element that can express grammatical contrasts. Morphemes may be described as “free” or “bound”. A free morpheme is one that can occur as a separate word, such as bank, no, house, and so on, whereas a bound morpheme can only occur as part of another word, such as the affixes non- and -ic in non-alcoholic, for example. Free morphemes may of course also form part of compound words such as car+port, best-known, river+bank.

The work that morphemes do in English seems fairly restricted, however, when we look at the morphology of some of the other languages of the world. Almost any class of word can undergo morphological transformations, the exceptions being interjections and conjunctions: those classes that are most affected in most inflecting languages are verbs, nouns, and adjectives, and, to a lesser extent, numbers and pronouns.

II

Function of Morphemes

In many of the world's language families, it is at least possible to add whole strings of morphemes to a root. There are usually very fixed rules for the order in which they must be added. The following examples, from a wide variety of the world's inflecting languages, demonstrate the range of functions that morphemes can perform.

A

Nouns

• Definiteness and indefiniteness: some Caucasian languages, for instance, distinguish a tree from the tree, for example, with a prefix.
• Gender or class: masculine, feminine, neuter, human, non-human, and a range of other classes. The Bantu languages (see African Languages) have a complex system of class markers for nouns.
• Number: singular and plural; some languages also have a dual number.
• Case: the number of cases, indicating spatial or other relations, varies from just a couple in some languages to 14 or more, for example in some Finno-Ugric languages.
• Possession: alienable (for instance, ownership of objects) and inalienable (for instance, possession of qualities).
• Diminutives: to indicate small size or endearment, such as the -let in piglet.
• (Pronouns can be seen morphologically as a sub-group of nouns; they may be marked for number or case.)

B

Verbs

• Tense: present, past (imperfect/aorist), future, perfect, and pluperfect.
• Aspect: perfective (completed action) and imperfective (incomplete, general, or habitual), as in the Slavic languages.
• Mood: indicative, imperative, conditional, optative, subjunctive, causative, benefactive, privative, relative, interrogative, and admirative.
• Valency: positive and negative (negation is universally the marked feature).
• Voice: active and passive (to sow/to be sown, for instance, in some Malayo-Polynesian languages; see Austronesian Languages); reflexive and reciprocal.
• Non-finite forms: present and past participles, active and passive.
• Modality or contingency: when or if.
• Pronoun affix: subject or object pronoun affixed to the verb, as in some Niger-Congo languages (also known as clitics).
• Agency: doer or place of the action of the verb.