The Subfields of Linguistics

1.2. Morphology

Definition: morphology is the study of morphemes, which are the smallest significant units of grammar. It is the branch of linguistics concerned with word formation. Example: in English, to indicate plurality, we add “s”: mother= mothers / to form the past, we add “ed”: stay=stayed.

Types of Morphemes
Free morpheme: is the morpheme that can stand alone in isolation: stay, mother. Free morphemes can be either:
Lexical Morphemes: carry the content of the message (nouns, verbs, adjectives).
Functional Morphemes: consists of functional words (articles, pronouns, prepositions).
Bound morpheme: is the morpheme that cannot usually stand alone and is typically attached to another free morpheme: plural ”s” and past “ed”. Bound morphemes (affixes) are divided into prefixes which precede the free morpheme: dis+honest and suffixes which follow the free morpheme: appear+ed.

Types of Morphology
We have two types of morphology: derivational and inflectional:

Derivational Morphology: is used to form new words:
Prefixation: bound morphemes (prefixes) are used to form new words keeping the same grammatical class of the word.
Example: from adjective to adjective: regular= irregular.
Suffixation: bound morphemes (suffixes) are used to change the grammatical class of a word.
Example from a noun to adjective: beauty= beautiful
Affixation: involves both prefixation and suffixation.
Example: un+mistake+able
For more examples of derivational morphemes, check Todd (1987); p. 43-44

Inflectional Morphology: bound morphemes (only suffixes) are used to create a new word but never change the grammatical category of that word. Inflectional morphology occurs with nouns, pronouns and verbs by forming the plural or possessive case of a noun or changing the tense of the verb or forming comparative or superlative: house=houses/ child=child’s book/ clean=cleaned/ wide=wider-widest.
In English, we have 8 inflectional morphemes: ”s” of plural/ “s” of 3rd person singular/ possessive ”s”/ “ed” of past tense/ ”ed” of past participle/ “ing” of present continuous/ “er” of comparative/ “est” of superlative,