Week3- morphology Dr. Monira I. Al-Mohizea

Functional morphs

• Functional morphemes:
• Also called ‘function words’) and they:
• Mostly signal syntactic relationships, & include prepositions (e.g. as - are free function morphemes), pronouns (e.g. his, her) and determiners (e.g. the, a, an).
• Functional morphemes belong to closed set that admits no new members (new prepositions, pronouns, and determiners are very rarely added to the language.

Important conclusion!

• It follows that the branch of morphology that examines the creation of new vocabulary items is primarily concerned with lexical morphemes

Word formation processes

Two broad types of word formation processes:

• Inflection versus derivation

Discuss the following:

a. She sleeps. b. *We sleeps

Othman sleeps *They sleeps

lt sleeps *You sleeps

What is inflection?

• Inflection is syntactically motivated word-formation.
• Inflection creates various forms of the same word
• E.g. third-person singular subject of a present tense verb (e.g. he reads a book every night)
• E.g.

Singular Plural

this boy (*these boy) those boys (*this boys)

that boy (*those boy) those boys (*that boys)

Inflection (1)

• English has a small number of inflectional morphemes.
• They are all suffixes. Discuss??
• Inflectional suffixes form a closed set (i.e. the language no longer adds to its inventory of inflectional endings. (English used to have considerably more complex inflectional morphology).
• Inflection is syntax driven.
• Many inflectional processes involve agreement.
• (subject-verb- number- agreement??).

Inflectional suffixes

Some terms..

Genitive: In grammar denoting a case of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives ( in grammatical agreement with them)