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Part I
What is the issue?
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Chapter 1
Morphemes and literacy
A starting point
Authored by Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes
We all know that words have meanings, but not everyone understands that the meaning of any word depends on its underlying structure. Words consist of morphemes, which are units of meaning. These morphemes, in our view, are of immense importance in children’s learning of the meaning of new words and also in their learning how to read and write familiar and novel words. The aim of our book is to show how important morphemes can be in children’s education and how easy it is to enhance their knowledge about morphemes and thus to increase the richness of their vocabulary and the fluency of their reading and writing.
What morphemes are
Take a fairly simple word like “unforgettable”. Its meaning is clear and widely understood, but the word has three different parts to it, and it is the combination of these three parts that gives the word its final and overall meaning.
The three parts to “unforgettable” are “un-” and “forget” and “-able”. “Forget” is actually a verb, because it refers to an action. Putting “-able” on the end of this verb makes it into an adjective (“forgettable”), which tells us that one can easily forget the person or event that the adjective is describing. The addition of “un-” at the beginning of the adjective gives it the opposite meaning: The new adjective (“unforgettable”) means that it is impossible to forget someone or something.
Remove one of these parts, and the word either takes on a different meaning or has no meaning at all. Each of the three parts in “unforgettable” therefore is a unit of meaning. The technical term for a unit of meaning is a “morpheme”. Some words contain one morpheme only, but many other words in English and in other languages contain more than one. “Forget” is a one-morpheme word, “forgettable” a two-morpheme word and “unforgettable”, as we have seen, contains three morphemes. So, when more than half a century ago thousands of people crooned the popular Nat King Cole song “Unforgettable”, they were repeating a three-morpheme word whose meaning they understood perfectly, though they may not have been completely aware that the word had three separate units to it or that these units were called morphemes.
In general, people do have some awareness of morphemes, although, as we shall be showing later on in the book, this awareness tends to be hazy and incomplete. Nevertheless, we can easily work out the meaning of entirely new words if these words are combinations of morphemes whose meaning we already understand. All of us immediately knew what Toni Braxton meant when we heard her desperate, but charming, plea “Unbreak my heart, uncry my tears”. None of us had met the word “uncry” before, but because we knew that adding “un-” to the beginning of a word reverses the meaning of this word (“untie”, “untidy”, “unfor-gettable”) we could grasp what the singer meant, and, at the same time, we could see that she was asking for a physical impossibility.
There are different kinds of morpheme. One distinction of great importance is between roots or stems (see Box 1.1) and affixes (Box 1.2). Every word with more than one morpheme in it contains a root, and this is combined with one or more than one affix morpheme (see Boxes 1.1 and 1.2 for a more detailed description of these morphemes). The word’s meaning starts with its root in the sense that the word would be meaningless without this particular morpheme. “Forget” is the root morpheme in “unforgettable” and “un-” and “-able” are both affixes. Affixes that precede the root are called “prefixes” and those that follow the root are called “suffixes”. These are the only kinds of affix that we have in English, but other languages, such as Swahili, also have “infixes”, which are added-on morphemes that appear in the middle of the root.
Another essential distinction is between “derivational” and “inflectional” affixes. Inflectional-affix morphemes, or “inflections” for short, tell us what kind of a word we are dealing with—whether it is a singular (“cat”) or a plural (“cats”) noun, a present (“kiss”) or a past (“kissed”) verb, an adjective (“kind”) or a comparative (“kinder”) or a superlative (“kindest”) adjective. So, the “-s” at the end of “cats”, the “-ed” at the end of “kissed” and the “-er” and “-est” at the end of “kinder” and “kindest” are inflections, and they combine with the root to produce two-morpheme words with a root and an affix.
There is a distinction to be made between roots and stems, although from the point of view of this book it is not a particularly important one. The root is the basic part of the word that remains when all derivational and inflectional affixes have been removed. For example, “teach” is the root for the word “teacher” and also for the word “unteachable”. The stem, on the other hand, is the part of the word that remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed. “Teacher” therefore is the stem for “teachers”. Thus, sometimes the root and the stem are the same, but sometimes they are different. “Cat” is both the root and the stem for the plural word “cats”, but “teach” is the root and “teacher” the stem for the plural word “teachers”. In all the examples and the tasks that we shall describe in this book, the roots and the stems are always identical, which is why the distinction is not an important one as far as this book is concerned.
The base or base word is another related term and it is relevant to our book. This refers to the word from which a complex word is derived (for example, “touchable” is the base for “untouchable”). Thus in the word “unbearable”, “bear” is the root, “bearable” is the base, and “un-” is the derivational prefix.
In English, affixes are morphemes that are attached to the stem or the root of a word (see Box 1.1 for the distinction between stems and roots). These affixes either come before the root or follow it. Those
that come before the root are called prefixes and those that follow it are suffixes.
There are two types of affix: Inflectional and derivational affixes. Inflectional affixes, or inflections, give you essential information about the word. For instance, all nouns are either singular or plural, and in English the presence of an /s/ or a /z/ sound at the end of a noun usually means that the word is in the plural, whereas its absence usually signals that it is a singular noun. This end sound is the plural inflection. When you hear the word “cats” or the word “dogs” the inflection at the end of each word tells you that it refers to more than one animal. Similarly, the absence of the “s” at the end of an English noun means, in most cases, that the noun is a singular one.
There are inflections in English for nouns (the plural “-s” and the possessive “-’s”), adjectives (the comparative “-er” and the superlative “-est”), and for verbs (the past tense “-ed”, the third-person singular in the present tense (“-s”) and the continuous tense (“-ing”). All inflections in English are suffixes.
Many other languages, such as French and Greek, are much more inflected than English. In these other two languages, for example, there are plural inflections for adjectives as well as for nouns. Some languages also mark gender in adjectives as well as nouns with inflections.
Derivational affixes are different. Adding a derivational affix to a word creates a different word, which is based on the original word but not the same. Sometimes the difference between the base word and the derived word is that they belong to different grammatical classes: For example, the derivational suffix “-ness” changes adjectives into abstract nouns ( for example “happy”–“happiness”) and the suffix “-ion” changes verbs, again, into abstract nouns (for example, “educate”–“education”). The suffix “-ful” changes nouns into adjectives (for example, “help”–“helpful”, “hope”–“hopeful”). Other derivations such as “un-” and “re-” bring about a radical change in the meaning of the base words to which they are attached (for example, “un-helpful”, “re-born”) but do not affect their grammatical class. Some derivational affixes are prefixes and others suffixes.
Derived words include the base word from which they are derived but in many cases the pronunciation of the base word changes in the derivation, as in “fifth”, which is derived from “five”, and “electricity” which is derived from “electric”.
Derivational morphemes create new words based on old ones. “Un-”, which, as we have seen, reverses the meaning normally given to the root that it precedes, is a good example of a derivational morpheme. So is the suffix “-able”, which we have met once already at the end of “unforgettable” and which appears at the end of many other English words, such as “unbearable”. Consider the relatively new coinage of the word “doable” (do-able), which we ourselves have heard our students and our builder use: “It’s doable”, they say, and we instantly understand what they mean, even though they often turn out to be wrong. This suffix is a derivational morpheme because it changes the word from the verb, represented by the base word, to an adjective, which says that the action referred to by the verb is entirely possible.
By now you should know, if you did not know before, how many morphemes there are in “education” or in “uneducated” (there are two in the first word and three in the second). You should be able to work out whether the affix at the beginning of “incompetent” and the affix at the end of “kisses” are derivational or inflectional (derivational in “incompetent” and inflectional in “kisses”). You should also have noted that there is a strong connection between morphemes and grammar: You can use the “-ed” at the end of verbs, in order to convey the meaning of past tense, but you cannot use the “-ed” ending with nouns; nouns don’t have a past tense. Once you are completely clear about roots and affixes, prefixes and suffixes, and derivations and inflections, we know that you will want us to justify our claim that these morphemes play a crucial but neglected role in children’s development and in their education.
Before we move on to the next section where we will begin to make this claim in earnest, we shoul...
