Chapter 3Lexical & Grammatical Morphology

Morphology

Lane 333

Lexicon & Grammar

‘actors’: grammatical word form of the LEXEME ACTOR

Consider morphemes in ‘act-or-s’

Each morpheme functions differently ‘-s’ reflects the category of NUMBER (plural) ‘-or’ changes verb into noun (performer of the

action)

Inflectional Morphology Inflection (grammatical morphology): the process

that builds word-forms of countless lexemes & it builds up paradigms of lexemes

never change the category of the word they are attached to (-s, -ing, -ed)

don’t change the meaning

they are only bound morphemes grammatical morphemes follow lexical

morphemes & come only after the stem

Inflectional suffixes of English 1. -s 3rd per.sg. present waits2. -ed past tense waited3. -ing progressive waiting4. -en past participle eaten5. -s plural chairs6. -’s possessive girl’s7. -er comparative faster8. -est superlative fastest

Derivational morphology

Derivation (Lexical morphology): the process of building up new words by adding morphemes (derivational) that change the meaning, or part of speech of a word

may change the category of the word they are attached to (-ful in ‘beatiful’, -ish in ‘warmish’)

change the meaning either bound or free produce lexemes

Exercise

3.3 Which morphemes are lexical & which are grammatical?

sparkler benighted detective tympani

speeding straightest platypus partly

threaded oxen disharmony ghastlier

horsebox embolden two-handed servant

Exercise3.5 Can you segment these words?

linguist utilize arrogant alacrity

terrify location mechanic democrat

Bound Lexical morphemes

the bits left over are ‘Bound Lexical morphemes’; e.g ‘lingu’

they don’t belong to any lexical category hard to specify their precise dictionary

meaning ‘bovine’ : ‘bov’ bound lexical morpheme (to

do with cattle)

Bound Lexical morphemes

Almost all bound lexical morphemes are of Greek, or Latin origin

used to create words for special purposes (scientific, technological)

Cranberry morphemes: have no other function but to distinguish different types of whatever is indicated by some other morpheme in the word; e.g. (raspberry, cranberry, bilberry)

no meaning except type of berry