Derivational Morphemes
Derivational morphemes are affixes added to a base word to create a new word with a different meaning or grammatical category. They can change the part of speech, such as turning a noun into a verb, or alter the meaning of the base word. For example, the suffix "-er" added to "teach" forms "teacher," changing the verb into a noun.
5 Key excerpts on "Derivational Morphemes"
eBook - ePubLinguistics for Language Teachers
Lessons for Classroom Practice
- Sunny Park-Johnson, Sarah J. Shin(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In English, loan words include terms that refer to foods (smorgasbord, wok, satay), popular culture (paparazzi, karaoke, bikini), and politics (apartheid, realpolitik, pogrom). As people from different cultures come into contact with one another, more and more words get added to the lexicon through borrowing. In addition, newly coined computer-related terms (download, hyperlink, RAM, realtime) also belong to the category of open class, as do existing words that have taken on additional meanings in online contexts (friend, unfriend, ping). Function morphemes, on the other hand, provide information about the grammatical relationships between words in a sentence (e.g., articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns). Function morphemes constitute a closed class, a lexical category in which members are fairly rigidly established and additions are made very rarely. The right column in Table 4.1 shows that bound morphemes can also be further divided into Derivational Morphemes and inflectional morphemes. Derivational Morphemes, when combined with a root, change either the meaning or the part of speech of the word. Derivational Morphemes in English are content morphemes and include both prefixes and suffixes. Table 4.2 provides some additional examples of Derivational Morphemes in English. Derivational Morphemes have the following properties: a) Change the part of speech and/or the meaning of a word (e.g., -ment in statement, re- in rewrite). b) Are not required by syntax (e.g., The use of un- in unhappy changes the meaning of the sentence He is unhappy but is not required to make the sentence grammatical). c) Are selective about what they can combine with (e.g., we can add -hood to brother to get brotherhood, but we cannot add -hood to friend to get * friendhood)...
- David Hornsby(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...A word like internationalization, for example, seems naturally divisible into five elements: inter+nation+al+iz+ation The second, [na ʃ ], derives from a free morpheme, namely the noun nation [nεI ʃ ] which can occur independently (a powerful nation, etc.). The rest are bound morphemes, which can only occur as parts of bigger units and not on their own: inter- is a prefix conveying the notion of ‘between’ in a range of adjectives (interactive, interpersonal, interplanetary), verbs (interpose, interact) and nouns (interpol, interface); -al is a grammatical suffix frequently used to derive adjectives from nouns (structural, financial, orbital); -ize/ise is a verbal suffix used to derive verbs, while -ation is an abstract noun suffix (rationalization, penetration, realization). Morphemes, then, are minimal meaning-bearing units, uniting an arbitrary form and meaning or grammatical function. As we have seen, a distinction is usually made between inflectional morphemes and Derivational Morphemes. Derivational morphology All living languages need constantly to renew and update their lexical stock. They may do so in two different ways: the first, lexical borrowing, involves taking words from another language and assimilating them according to the phonological and morphological rules of the ‘borrower’ language. All of these English words, for example, have been borrowed from other languages: robot (Czech); shampoo (Hindi); kangaroo (Guugu Yimidhirr: North Queensland, Australia); entrepreneur (French); rucksack (German)...
eBook - ePubApplying Linguistics in the Classroom
A Sociocultural Approach
- Aria Razfar, Joseph C. Rumenapp(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Morphology Building Words with English Learners Learning Goals Summarize the basic concepts of morphology. Identify morphological processes. Understand different types of morphological systems in the world’s languages. Understand the difficulties ELs may have in learning English morphology. Use derivational and inflectional rules in the classroom. Create a case study to analyze a particular topic in morphology. Use morphological concepts in discourse analysis. KEY TERMS/IDEAS: morpheme, lexeme, lexicon, derivation, inflection, agglutinating, fusional, isolating, nominalization In Chapter 5 we discussed the syntax, or grammar of language. Morphology is a related field in linguistics. Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish what belongs to syntax and what belongs to morphology because there is much overlap. What one language does in syntax, like through changes in word order as seen in the last chapter, another may do through morphology, by changing the word itself. Therefore, it is often better to think about both fields together, as morphosyntax. In Chapter 5, we focused more on how words (in the discrete analytic sense) relate to each other. In this chapter, we will examine how words are built internally to create distinct meaningful units. Morphology is the study of a language’s morphemes and the rules governing its transformations for communicative purposes. Morphemes consist of words, affixes, intonation, stress, and their implied or explicit contexts of use. In this chapter we will see how the traditional concept of “word,” especially in the isolated sense, constrains our view of how we learn, develop, and actually use language to make meaning. As we learn about the ELs in our classrooms, we need to be aware of the complexities of languages in the world. If we look at language only through our “English eyes” we will certainly misunderstand the way language is used by ELs...
eBook - ePubSign Languages
Structures and Contexts
- Joseph Hill, Diane Lillo-Martin, Sandra Wood(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In addition to inflectional and derivational morphology, word formation is a component of morphology. Word formation encompasses the various ways that new words are added to a language. We will discuss sign language examples of each of these types of morphology in reverse order in the subsequent sections. 3.2 Word formation New words constantly enter the vocabulary of a language, and other words may decline in usage. Words also change their meaning over time. All of these are natural processes of language, and not the “corruption” of a language by “kids these days” as often bemoaned. There are a number of processes that are used by languages when they need new words. Oftentimes, the existing words are used in a new way. Sometimes a word is used by itself with a new meaning, such as “mouse” to refer to a computer’s pointing device. At other times, words combine into new, compound words. Compounds in English include “blackboard,” “low-fat,” and “motion sensor” (note that spelling might be with a space, hyphen, or no space – spelling is not a good indication of compound status). Words can also be borrowed from another language; when this happens, they are generally pronounced in such a way as to fit the language they are borrowed into, such as when the original language form includes sounds that the borrowing language doesn’t have. An example is the word “champagne,” borrowed from French, which is pronounced in English with different vowels from those used in French, and a different final n-sound. Frequently, the association between a word and its meaning is completely arbitrary, such as the fact that “cat” refers to domesticated felines in English. When new words enter a language, they may also be arbitrary, but they are also frequently motivated in some way, either by a kind of iconicity or by rules of word formation...
eBook - ePub- Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...4 The study of words Morphology Let’s now consider how we study speakers’ unconscious knowledge of word structure. In Chapter 2, in the ‘Our knowledge of grammar’ section, we briefly discussed how our knowledge of word structure, or morphology, includes knowledge of morphemes, or parts of words, and of affixation (suffixes and prefixes in English for example, and the roots and words they attach to). We also have knowledge of word formation rules such as clipping, blending, backformation, compounding, etc. As we will see in this chapter, languages don’t necessarily share the same morphological rules. Consider, for example, one type of word formation that doubles a part of the word (called reduplication) that occurs in Lushootseed, a language of the Pacific Northwest (adapted from Hess & Hilbert, 1995): ʔálʔal house ʔáʔálʔal hut ʔúq w’ ud pull out ʔúʔúq w’ ud pull part way out híwil go ahead híhíwil go on ahead a bit q’íx w upstream q’íq’íx w a little bit upstream The first two sounds of a word are doubled in order to make a diminutive: the ʔá of the word for house is doubled to make hut : ʔáʔálʔal. As we will also see in this chapter, there is much more to the study of morphology than making words. In fact, the question What is a word ? is actually quite difficult to answer, because not all languages build words in the same way, yet speakers share some kind of common knowledge that allows them to recognize what is and what is not a possible word in their language. Morphemes A morpheme is often described as the smallest unit of meaning in a word. This suggests that there are two morphemes in the word pancake, namely, pan and cake, both of which have rather obvious, recognizable meanings, and both of which are words by themselves. Other morphemes have meaning too, though perhaps not in the dictionary sense. English speakers would probably all agree that there are three morphemes in waspishness (wasp, -ish, and -ness)...
