Morphology: the study of structure of words

Linguistics Knowledge [Competence]

1-     Knowledge of sounds of the language

2-     Knowledge of words of the language

Native speaker has a lexicon in the head

Lexicon: Mental Dictionary

1-     Sounds of the words

2-     Grammatical category of word

3-     Meaning of word

Content word: has main meaning of the sentences.

Open class: it accepts the addition of new words

Function words: it shows the relation between words in the sentence.

Closed class: does not accept additional words.

Morpheme: minimal unit of meaning, smallest linguistic unit.

                                  Word

Morpheme      TO         Root      TO       Morpheme

                                    TO

       Morpheme

Morpheme Conditions

1-     Cannot be divided

2-     Has to have a meaning

Types of Morphemes:

1-     Free Morphemes: can occurs alone in a sentence

2-     Bound Morphemes: cannot occur alone in a sentence and they have to be attached to another morpheme.

Bound Morphemes are in 4 positions in a word.

1-     Prefixes: attach at the beginning of the free morpheme

2-     Suffixes: attach at the end of the free morpheme

3-     Infixes: attach inside a free morpheme

4-     Circumfixes: attach at the beginning and at the end of a morpheme.

Root: cannot be divided

Stem: is like a host, it can be divided and accepts more morphemes

Word: is the final form, it can be divided but no morphemes can be added to it.

Why study morphemes?

We don’t know where one word starts and ends, only native speakers know, so we introduced morphemes.