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UNIT 1: WORD STRUCTURE

I. Lesson points:

• The word
• The morpheme
• Representation of Internal Structure of Words (Tree & Bracket diagram)

II. Content:

1. Introduction

Speakers of a language use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences. These rules
comprise the grammar of a language, which is learned when you acquire the language and includes the sound system (the
phonology), how words may be combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), ways in which sounds and meanings are
related (the semantics), and the words or lexicon. The range of constructions that is studied by grammar is very large, and
grammarians have often divided it into sub-fields. The oldest and most widely-used division is that between morphology and
syntax (Figure 1.1).

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2. Morphology

As Figure 1 shows, morphology is a branch of grammar. The term comes from the Greek word morpheme, which means
“form.” Morphology is concerned with the structure of words; in other words, it is the field within linguistics that studies
word structure and word formation.
 

There are two basic types of words in human language - simple and complex. Simple words are those that cannot be broken
down into smaller meaningful units while complex words can be analyzed into smaller parts (constituents). The words
“houses”, for example, is made up of the form “house” and the plural marker -s, neither of which can be divided into smaller
parts. Morphology deals with the internal structure of complex words.

3.Morpheme

Words, like “houses”, are considered minimal free forms but are not the minimal meaningful unit of language because they
can often be broken down further. As we can see, “houses” consists of two meaningful parts: “house” and “-s”. These
minimal meaningful units are called morpheme in linguistics. While many English words consist of only one morpheme,
others can contain two, three, or more (see Table 1).

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4. Types of morphemes

Lexical and Grammatical morphemes

The words of any language can be divided into broad types of categories, closed and open, of which the latter are most
relevant to morphology. The closed categories are the function words: pronouns like you, and she; conjunctions like and, if
and because; determiners like a and the; and a few others. Newly coined and borrowed words cannot be added to these
categories. However, new words can be created by adding morphemes to content words that belong to the open categories,
which are also known as major lexical categories, including: noun (N), verb (B), adjective (A), and adverb (Adv). Because
the major problem of morphology is how people make up and understand words that they have never encountered before,
morphology is concerned largely with lexical categories.
The simple function words and content words are also called function morpheme (i.e. grammatical morpheme) and content
morpheme (also lexical morpheme). In other words, a lexical morpheme names a concept/idea in our record of experience of
the world (e.g. house, car, tree, etc.). Grammatical morphemes do not really have a sense in and of themselves; instead, they
express some sort of relationship between lexical morphemes (e.g. a/the, and, but, etc.).

Free and Bound morphemes

A morpheme is considered free if it can constitute a word by itself, and a bound morpheme must be attached to another
element. The morpheme “house”, for example, is free since it can be used as a word on its own; the plural marker “-s”, on
the other hand, is bound.

Root and Affixes

Root morphemes are (usually free) morphemes around which words can be built up through the addition of more bound
morphemes. These bound morphemes, attached to a root, are called affixes.
Affixes have three types: prefixes are morphemes attached to the front of a root; suffixes to the end; infixes (not popular in
English) are inserted inside a root.

Inflectional and Derivation morphemes

Derivational morphemes are those that can be added to a word to create another word with new meaning and/ or new
syntactic category (new part of speech).
Inflectional morphemes do not change the meaning or syntactic category of a word. They can mark a word’s grammar
category such as tense, number, aspect and so on. Some examples are analyzed in Figure 1.2.

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5. Internal Structure of Words

Like sentences, complex words such as houses and teachers have an internal structure. In this section, we will consider the
categories and representation that are relevant to the analysis of word structure.
Let’s look in some detail at the word denationalization. This word contains five morphemes: de-, nation, -al, -ize, -ation.
Nation is a free morpheme, since it can stand alone as a word, while the rest are bound morphemes. But simply listing the
parts of the word and whether they are free or bound does not tell us the structure of this word (how the parts are organized
to form the word). The parts have to be put together in a particular way, with a particular arrangement and order. For
example, none of these possible orders of the same five morphemes constitutes an English word:

* ationizalnationde
* alizdeationnation
* nationdeizational
In fact, of the 120 possible arrangements of these five morphemes, only one, denationalization, could be an English word.
The order is so strict because each of the bound morphemes is an affix, a morpheme which not only must be bound, but must
be bound in a particular position. Furthermore, each affix attaches only to certain particular lexical category (either N or V
or A), and results in a word of another particular lexical category. The negative affix -de, for example, attaches to verbs and
forms other verbs:
ionize - deionzie
segregate - desegregate

Similarly, the affix -al forms adjectives from nouns, -ize forms verbs from adjectives or noun, and -ation forms nouns from
verbs.
Given these restrictions, the structure of the word denationalization can best be seen as the result of beginning with the
simple form nation, which we call the root of the word, and adding affixes successively, one at a time, as follows:

nation
national
nationalize
denationalize
denationalization

The structure of the entire word may be represented by means of either a set of labeled brackets or a tree diagram. Both are
shown in Figure 1.3 the diagram reveals how the word begins at its root and is built up one affix at a time. The abbreviation
Af stands for affix.
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[[de[[[nation]N al]A ize]V]V ation]N

Exercise:

Task 1. Consider the following words and answer the questions below.

inputs - Persian-  within-  another -  realized

Group the morphemes of these words into free morphemes and bound morphemes and state whether the bound morphemes
are derivational or inflectional affixes. Some examples have been done for you.

Bound morpheme
Word Free morpheme
Derivational affix Inflectional affix
Example: loneliness Lone ly; ness  
Example: White House White , house    

Answer Key

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Task 2. Draw Bracket diagram and Tree diagram and for the following words:

shipper -  disobey - simply - anticlimaxes

digitizes - activity- resettled - disengagement

Answer Key

Review

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