Linguistics - Morphology

Refactored from Linguistics Notes Meta

• What a word means
  • It can be defined as the meaning of a word that you find in the dictionary (or a lexicon in linguistic terms)
  • Or it can be defined as “the largest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning”
  • Actually, we don’t know
• The smallest unit of unpredictable combinations that mean something is called a morpheme
  • free morphemes can stand and mean something on its own
  • A compound is created by combining morphemes
  • bound morphemes like -s in English can’t stand on its own
    • bound roots are bound morphemes that can also be the root
  • The stem of a word is the morpheme that make the word mean something
  • The morpheme boundary is the place where two morphemes meet
• A lexeme or a lexical item is a word or a group of words that mean something that cannot be predicted from its constituent morphemes.
• Word construction
  • It usually starts from a root like rabbit
  • Add affixes, which can be categorised into
    • prefix that comes before the root like micro-
    • suffix that comes after the root like -able
    • infix that goes in between words
    • circumfix that goes around word
    • Special cases like changing vowels in English
      • More example: in Arabic
        • kitaab ‘book’
        • kutub ‘books’
        • kaatib ‘writer’
        • maktab ‘office’
  • Every time we add an affix, the new word becomes the stem if it mean something
  • Suppletion is when you change the word altogether. Example:
    • go –> went

References