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Morphology
Dr. Radhika Mamidi
Why are we studying
morphology?
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The knowledge of words will help us process
language computationally at word level.
Knowledge of words include word structure
and word formation rules.
This knowledge will help us in developing
tools like “Morphological Analyzers” and
“Morphological Generators”.
What’s Morphology?
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The study of word structure
The study of the mental dictionary:
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How are words stored in the mind?
What is a possible word?
Example:
(i) At the supermarket, the girls bought pink
cheeriots and the boys blue fistings.
(ii) When their mother signaled, the girls barried
home unhappily.
The words ‘fistings’ and ‘barried’ do not exist.
However, assuming they are valid words of
English, we ‘guess’ the meaning by context
and the position of the word in the given
sentence. We do this using our general
knowledge and linguistic knowledge.
What do you know of
cheeriots and fistings?
Part of speech
= nouns [comes after adjectives]
[-s ending]
= more than one
Meaning
= some objects that have color
[clue: supermarket]
= some object that is sold; perhaps a toy
The word forms are more like toys, balls, ribbons.
What do you know of barried
Part of Speech
= verb [position]
[ends in –ed]
= past tense
Base form
= barry
Meaning
= go
The word form is more like carried, married.
What’s the Longest Word of English?
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Could it be ismestablishmentariandisanti ?
Why not when antidisestablishmentarianism is possible.
There is a systematic way of word formation.
Possible words:
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anti-missile (adjective)
anti-missile missile: a missile used for anti-missile purposes
anti- anti-missile missile missile: a missile used against antimissile missiles
antiNmissileN+1, where N can go until….
Morphemes
Have a sound [form] and a meaning:
Example: “cats”
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/kaet/ “four-legged animal”
/-s/
“plural number”
Even though /-s/ has a sound and a meaning, it
can’t mean “plural” by itself…
It has to attach to a noun
“A morpheme is the smallest unit of wordform
that has meaning”
Examples:
cats = cat + -s
girlish = girl + -ish
unfriendly = un- + friend + -ly
cat, -s, girl, -ish, un-, friend, -ly are morphemes
Even Bush knows morphology
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(…though he may use it differently than the
rest of us)
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The war on terrorism has transformationed the USRussia Relationship
We’re working to help Russia securitize the
dismantled warheads
The explorationists are only willing to help move
equipment during the winter
This case has had full analyzation and has been
looked at a lot
Compositionality
“Explorationists”
 explore: to spend an extended effort looking around
a particular area
 -ation: can attach to Verbs, the process of Xing
 -ist: can attach to Nouns, one who performs an
action Y
 -s: attaches to Nouns, more than one Z
 explorationists: a compositional word
 Fully compositional meaning is based on its parts
Non-compositionality
“Inflect”
 Is inflect morphologically complex?
 It contains more than one morpheme.
 What do in- and flect mean?
 This is a case of a non-compositional meaning. In
explorationists, if you know the meaning of the parts,
you know the meaning of the whole. Not necessarily
so for inflect.
 Non-compositional meaning cannot be derived from
its parts.
Lexical/Content words
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Words which are not function words are called
content words or lexical words: these include nouns,
verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs, though some
adverbs are function words (e.g. then, why).
They belong to open class.
Dictionaries define the specific meanings of content
words, but can only describe the general usages of
function words.
By contrast, grammars describe the use of function
words in detail, but have little interest in lexical
words.
Function words
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Function words or grammatical words are words
that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous
meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical
relationships with other words within a sentence.
Function words may be prepositions, pronouns,
auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, grammatical articles
or particles, all of which belong to the group of
closed class words.
To know about morpheme we should
know about….
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Free morphemes vs. Bound morphemes
Lexical morphemes vs. Functional
morphemes
Null/Zero morpheme
Inflectional morphemes vs. Derivational
morphemes
Root morphemes vs. Affix morphemes
Free vs Bound morphemes
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electr- and tox- have isolable meanings in
electric, electrify, toxic, (de-)toxify
But they cannot be pronounced on their own:
they are bound morphemes
girl and book have isolable meanings in girls,
girlish, books, booked, booking
They can occur on their own: they are free
morphemes
Are prefixes and suffixes bound
morphemes?
Lexical morpheme
Lexical free morphemes
apple, smart, book, slow, eat, write, morning
They can exist on their own as independent words.
Lexical bound morphemes: -ceive, -ject, cran-, -ship, unThey cannot be used independently.
They need another morpheme [free or bound] to form
a word.
Eg: re-ceive, con-ceive, sub-ject, pro-ject, cran-berry,
scholar-ship, fellow-ship, un-kind, happi-ness
Functional morphemes
Functional free morphemes:
of, with, she, it, and, although, however,
because, then
Functional bound morphemes:
-s, -s, -ed, -en, -ing
cats, eats, played, eaten, playing
Four-way contrasts
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Lexical, Free: Nouns, Verbs, Adj, Adv
cat, town, call, house, hall, smart, fast
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Lexical, Bound: including derivational affixes
rasp- [raspberry], cran- [cranberry] , -ceive [conceive,
receive], un- [unhappy], re-[rewrite]
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Functional, Free: Prepositions, Articles
with, at, and, an, the
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Functional, Bound: inflectional affixes
-s, -ed, -ing, -en [eats, walked, laughing, eaten]
Exercise 1
Identify the free and bound morphemes in the
following words
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walked, talked, danced, arrived
playhouse, watchdog, football player
drinking, playing, eating
import, export, transport
raspberry, cranberry
invert, convert, divert
Can the following words be decomposed?
 delight, news, traitor, bed, evening
Exercise 2
Identify the lexical and functional morphemes in the
following words.
Mention if they are free or bound.
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politically
beautiful
between
writing
raspberries
unable
nationalization
Inflection vs. Derivation
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Derivational suffixes: allow us to make new
words
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Mary is a writer [writeV – writerN]
Mary writes for a living [liveV – livingN]
Inflectional suffixes: required in order to
make the sentence grammatical
Inflected words belong to the same class
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*Yesterday I walk to class [walkV – walkedV]
*I like all my student [studentN – studentsN]
Inflectional Morphology
Examples: [the POS remains the same]
VERBS
EAT = eat, eats, ate, eaten, eating
DRINK = drink, drinks, drank, drunk, drinking
PLAY = play, plays, played, played, playing
-s, -ed, -en, -ing are inflectional morphemes
NOUNS
PLAY = play, plays
GIRL = girl, girls
SHEEP = sheep, sheep
-s, 0 are inflectional morphemes
Derivational morphology
Two types:
 Can change the category {N,V,A,Adv}
driveV +er = driverN
eatv + able = eatableadj
girlN + ish = girlishadj
disturb V + ance = disturbance N
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Doesn’t have to change the category
un + doV = undoV
re+fryv = refryv
un+happinessN = unhappinessN
Derivational – more examples
Verbs
eat – eatable [adj], eatables [noun]
drink – drinking [noun]
play – player [noun]
-able, -ing, -er are derivational morphemes
Nouns
play – playful [adj], replay [verb]
girl – girlish [adj], girlhood [noun]
sheep – sheepish[adj]
-ful, re-, -ish, -hood are derivational morphemes
Exercise 3
Each of the words below contains two
morphemes – a root and a derivational affix.
Decide if the derivational affix changes only
the meaning or the class of the root as well.
rewrite
unclear
unhappy
hopeless
creation
helpful
happily
happiness
undo
Null/Zero morpheme
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a null morpheme is a morpheme that is
realized by a phonologically null affix (an
empty string of phonological segments)
a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix
It's also called zero morpheme; the process
of adding a null morpheme is called null
affixation,
Examples
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cat = cat + -0 = ROOT("cat") + SINGULAR
cats = cat + -s = ROOT("cat") + PLURAL
sheep = sheep + -0 = ROOT(“sheep") +
SINGULAR
sheep = sheep + -0 = ROOT(“sheep") +
PLURAL
More examples
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darken[verb] = dark [adj] + -en
Meaning = make more ‘Adjective’
redden [verb] = red + -en [make more Red]
yellow [verb] = yellow + 0 [make more yellow]
brown [verb] = brown + 0 [make more brown]
blacken [verb] = black + -en [make more black]
Root Morphemes vs Affix morphemes
Root morphemes are morphemes around
which larger words are built.
Root morphemes are free or bound.
Affixes are additional morphemes added to
roots to create multi- or poly-morphemic
words.
Affixes are always bound.
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Rats
Root = rat [free morpheme]
Affix = -s [bound morpheme]
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Project
Root = -ject [bound morpheme]
Affix = pro- [bound morpheme]
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Mice
Root = mouse [free morpheme]
Affix = -s [bound morpheme]
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Ate
Root = eat [free morpheme]
Affix = -ed [bound morpheme]
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Disgracefulness
Root = grace [free morpheme]
Affixes = dis-, -ful, -ness [bound morpheme]
Affixes
Morphemes added to free forms to make other
free forms are called affixes.
Mainly four kinds of affixes:
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2.
3.
4.
Prefixes (at beginning) – “un-” in “unable”
Suffixes (at end) – “-ed” in “walked”
Circumfixes (at both ends) – “en—en” in enlighten
Infixes (in the middle) – “-um-” in kumilad [‘to be red’],
fumikas [‘to be strong’]
[ kilad = ‘red’, fikas = ‘strong’ in Bontoc language]
Affixes are bound morphemes.
Prefixes
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No prefix can determine the category of a
complex word
What does un- mean when it attaches to
adjectives?
unkind, unhappy
What does un- mean when it attaches to
verbs?
undo, untie
Suffixes
We can represent the fact that the rightmost
suffix determines the category of a word for
triplets like rational, rationalize, rationalization
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rational = adjective
rationalize = verb
rationalization = noun
Allomorph
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An allomorph is a variant form of a
morpheme.
The meaning remains the same, while the
sound can vary.
Example: the different forms of past tense
morpheme /-ed/ [as we hear]
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barked, hissed [t]
raised, smelled [d]
added, trotted [ed]
-s for nouns
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Example: the different forms of plural
morpheme /-s/ are: [as we read]
-s --- cats, dogs, boys, girls
-es – watches, churches
-0 – sheep
/-s/, /-es/ and 0 are allomorphs of /-s/
{If pronunciation is considered, then /-s/, /-z/, /iz/ and 0 are allomorphs of /-s/ in the above
examples}
Hierarchical Structure within
Words
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the word unlockable is ambiguous
[[un + lock] able]: able to be unlocked
[un [lock +able]]: not able-to-be-locked
French History Teacher
Old Ladies Hostel
Old Bombay Highway
Disgraceful
Adj
/
\
Noun Suffix
/ \
|
Prefix Noun
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Dis grace ful
Ungraceful
Adj
/
\
Prefix Adj
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/ \
| Noun Suffix
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Un grace ful
Exercise 4
Give the hierarchical structure of the following words
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unwanted
disfigurement
interchangeable
maladjusted
actors
retries
unhappiness