Morphology

 This term, which literary means 'the study of forms', was originally used in biology, but since the middle of the nineteenth century, has also been used to describe the type of investigation that analyzes all those basic 'elements' used in a language. These basic 'elements' are technically known as 'morphemes'.

Morpheme

"A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function is known as morpheme". For example, in the sentence "The police reopened the investigation", the word reopened consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit of meaning is re-(meaning 'again'), another is open and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed(indicating past tense).

Types of morphemes

There are two types of morphemes.

1. Free morphemes
2. Bound morphemes

1) Free morphemes

Morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words are called free morphemes. For example, open and tour. The free morphemes can generally be identified as the set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs etc. When they are used with bound morphemes, the basic word forms are technically known as "stems".

2) Bound morphemes

Bound morphemes are those forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-,-est,-ed and -s. All the affixes in English are bound morphemes. For example, "undressed"

                      Un-                        dress                   -ed
                   Prefix                       Stem                  Suffix
                   Bound                      Free                   Bound
There are a number of English words in which the element treated as the stem, is not, in fact, a free morpheme. In words such as receive, reduce and repeat, we can identify the bound morpheme re- at the beginning, but the elements -ceive, -duce, and -peat are not separate word forms and hence they are not free morphemes. These types of forms are known as "bound stems".

Types of free morphemes

There are further two types of free morphemes.
           I) Lexical morphemes
          II) Functional morphemes

Lexical-morphemes

The free-morphemes that carry the content of the message to be conveyed are called lexical-morphemes. For example, girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look, follow, break etc. These morphemes consist of the set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs.

Functional-morphemes 

Other types of free morphemes are called functional morphemes. For example, and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them etc. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.

Types of bound-morphemes

There are also two further types of bound morphemes.
              I) Derivational-morphemes
             II) Inflectional-morphemes

Derivational-morphemes

A morpheme that can change the grammatical category of a word is called derivational-morpheme. These bound-morphemes are used to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For example, the addition of the derivational morpheme '-ness' changes the adjective good to goodness. The noun care can become the adjective 'careful' or 'careless' by the addition of the derivational morphemes -full or -less respectively. A list of derivational morphemes will include affixes.

Inflectional-morphemes

A morpheme that cannot change the grammatical category of a word is called inflectional-morpheme. These morphemes are used to indicate the aspects of the grammatical functions of a word. These morphemes are used to show if a word is singular or plural, if it is past or not and if it is a comparative or possessive form. English has only eight inflectional morphemes illustrated in the following sentences.

                                         Noun +        -'s,-s

For example, Hina's brothers are engineers.
In this sentence, there are two inflections, -'s(possessive) and -s(plural), are attached to nouns.

                                         Verb+          -s,ing,-ed,-en

For example
Hina loves singing.
She is getting ready for duty.
She worked hard.
She has taken over of her duty.
There are four inflections attached to verbs -s(3rd person singular), -ing(present participle), -ed(past tense) and -en(past participle).

                                         Adjective+   -est,-er

For example, "Hina is the loveliest and cleverer daughter in her family".
There are two inflections attached to adjectives, -est(superlative) and -er(comparative). In English all the inflectional morphemes are suffixes.

Allomorph

In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme, that is, when a unit of meaning varies in sound without changing meaning. The term allomorph explains the comprehension of phonological variation for specific morphemes. The allomorph of a morpheme is derived from phonological rules and any morphophonemic rules that may apply to that morpheme. The plural morpheme in English, usually written as -'s, has at least three allomorphs:

/s/            as in shops /ʃɒps/                    gets /ɡets/                  takes /teɪks/
/z/            as in jobs /dʒɒbz/
/ɪz/           as in buses /bʌsɪz/

Zero morphemes

A zero morpheme is a morpheme, consisting of no phonetic form that is proposed in some analyses as an allomorph that is ordinarily realized by a morph having some phonetic form. It's also called null morpheme. The process of adding a null morpheme is called null affixation, null derivation or zero derivation. The null morpheme is represented as either the figure zero (0) or the empty set symbol ∅. e.g. The plural form that is realized in two sheep is ∅,in contrast with the plural -s in two goats.

Morphological description

 In the sentence "The teacher's frankness shocked the boy's parents", we can identify thirteen total morphemes.

The (functional)     teach (lexical)     -er (derivational)      -'s (inflectional)    frank (lexical)    -ness (derivational)      shock (lexical)  -ed  (inflectional)     the (functional)     boy (lexical)    -'s (inflectional)    parent  (lexical)    -'s (inflectional)

To sum up the whole debate, one of the advantages in learning morphology is to understand the nature of words such as how the word is formed and structured. Therefore, learning morphology itself will help students to be more creative in creating new words, for they have learned how to form the words.