[فهد هزاع]

ogy Date:3/2/2013; 22/3/1434H
Course code: Lane 333
Course instructor: Dr. Thamer Alharthi

What is morphology ?

Morph = form or shape, ology = study of
Morphology is the study of the basic building blocks of meaning in language.


What is a morpheme?

A morpheme is the minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. For example,

The English word play (basic element) that stands for its own and other additional elements plays, played, playing, replay.

Typology of the morpheme

- Free morpheme
That is a morpheme is free if it is able to appear as a word by itself.
- Bound morpheme
It is bound if it can only appear as part of a larger, multi-morphemic word.


Bound morphemes
Bound morphemes are those forms that cannot normally stand alone and are attached to another form. Consider :
Undressed careless

Un- dress -ed care -less -ness
Prefex stem suffix stem suffix suffix
Bound free bound free bound bound

Further categories of morphemes
 Lexical morphemes are usually free morphemes. They are the set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that carry the content of the messages we convey.
for example, girl, world, happy, chase, farm
 Functional morphemes are words that bring a function inside of them. They assist lexical morphemes to add details to the meaning. These can be found in conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. For example, and, on, the, them

Types of bound morphemes

 Derivational morphemes: they refer to those bound morphemes that create new words out of/with a free morpheme. For example,
Payment, careful, slowly.
 Inflectional morphemes. These are morphemes that help the words to change their grammatical functions. For example,
Pens, liked, biggest, taken


Now do the exercises in the textbook

Good luck