Week3- morphology Dr. Monira I. Al-Mohizea

Week3- Morphology

Dr. Monira I. Al-Mohizea

What is this?

A ‘Horse’ is….

• In Arabic it is called ‘حصان’.
• In French it is called ‘cheval’.
• in English it is called ‘horse’.
• None of these is a better or worse way symbolizing the concept 'horse'.
• There is no principle that can enable us to determine which linguistic sign will have a particular meaning. The meanings of all morphemes and many words if have to be listed in our mental lexicon??, and memorized.

What is a ‘Lexicon’

• Formally, in linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes.
• The vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge (mental).

Exception!

• In the case of onomatopoeia, where the word imitates some aspect of the meaning of the concept it represents (i.e. the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named, e.g. cuckoo, sizzle). The linguistic sign is iconic and not arbitrary.
• But the iconicity is closely linked to convention, and arbitrariness.
• E.g. the sound imitative of a dog's bark is woof in English, hut, in Romanian ham ham, in Russian gaf gaf, in Estonian.
• The differences do not reflect any dialectal differences among canine (dogs) populations.

Classifications of morphemes

• Morphemes are classified as free or bound morphemes.
• a free morpheme can occur in isolation (as a word on its own).

E.g. dog, write, deserve and child.

• a bound morpheme cannot occur in isolation,

E.g. , the forms -ish, tin-, -ed, -1y, re-, -ing

• Any form that is used to represent a morpheme is called a “morph’’.

E.g. the word child-ish has two morphs.

Allomorphs

• Morphemes are represented by more than one form in different contexts. These variants are called allomorphs.
• Allomorphs are morphemes having the same function but different form. Unlike synonyms they usually cannot be replaced one by the other.
• Allomorphs are distinct with regard to form, but they have the same grammatical or semantic function.
• E.g. the indefinite article in English has two allomorphs:
• a is used if the next word starts with a consonant, e.g., a leg, a mother, a tomato.
• an is used if the next word starts with a vowel, e.g., an ear, an egg, etc. They differ in pronunciation but are semantically identical.