3: Morphemes
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What’s a word? It seems almost silly to ask such a simple question, but if you think about it, the question doesn’t have an obvious answer. A famous linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure said that a word is like a coin because it has two sides to it that can never be separated. One side of this metaphorical coin is the form of a word: the sounds (or letters) that combine to make the spoken or written word. The other side of the coin is the meaning of the word: the image or concept we have in our mind when we use the word. So a word is something that links a given form with a given meaning.
Linguists have also noticed that words behave in a way that other elements of mental grammar don’t because words are free. What does it mean for a word to be free? One observation that leads us to say that words are free is that they can appear in isolation, on their own. In ordinary conversation, we don’t often utter just a single word, but there are plenty of contexts in which a single word is indeed an entire utterance. Here are some examples:
What are you doing? Cooking.
What are you cooking? Soup.
How does it taste? Delicious.
Can I have some? No.
Each of those single words is perfectly grammatical standing in isolation as the answer to a question.
Another reason we say that words are free is that they’re moveable: they can occupy a whole variety of different positions in a sentence. Look at these examples:
Penny is making soup.
Soup is delicious.
I love to eat soup when it’s cold outside.
The word soup can appear as the last word in a sentence, as the first word, or in the middle of a sentence. It’s free to be moved around.
The other important observation we can make about words is that they’re inseparable: We can’t break them up by putting other pieces inside them. For example, in the sentence,
Penny cooked some carrots.
The word carrot has a bit of information added to the end of it to show that there’s more than one carrot. But that bit of information can’t go just anywhere: it can’t interrupt the word carrot:
*Penny cooked some car-s-rot.
This might seem like a trivial observation – of course, you can’t break words up into bits! – but if we look at a word that’s a little more complex than carrots we see that it’s an important insight. What about:
Penny bought two vegetable peelers.
That’s fine, but it’s totally impossible to say:
*Penny bought two vegetables peeler.
even though she probably uses the peeler to peel multiple vegetables. It’s not that a plural -s can’t go on the end of the word vegetable; it’s that the word vegetable peeler is a single word (even though we spell it with a space between the two parts of it). And because it’s a single word, it’s inseparable, so we can’t add anything else into the middle of it.
So we’ve seen that a word is a free form that has a meaning. But you’ve probably already noticed that there are other forms that have meaning and some of them seem to be smaller than whole words. A morpheme is the smallest form that has meaning. Some morphemes are free: they can appear in isolation. (This means that some words are also morphemes.) But some morphemes can only ever appear when they’re attached to something else; these are called bound morphemes.
Let’s go back to that simple sentence,
Penny cooked some carrots.
It’s quite straightforward to say that this sentence has four words in it. We can make the observations we just discussed above to check for isolation, moveability, and inseparability to provide evidence that each of Penny, cooked, some, and carrots is a word. But there are more than four units of meaning in the sentence.
Penny cook-ed some carrot-s.
The word cooked is made up of the word cook plus another small form that tells us that the cooking happened in the past. And the word carrots is made up of carrot plus a bit that tells us that there’s more than one carrot.
That little bit that’s spelled –ed (and pronounced a few different ways depending on the environment) has a consistent meaning in English: past tense. We can easily think of several other examples where that form has that meaning, like walked, baked, cleaned, kicked, kissed. This –ed unit appears consistently in this form and consistently has this meaning, but it never appears in isolation: it’s always attached at the end of a word. It’s a bound morpheme. For example, if someone tells you, “I need you to walk the dog,” it’s not grammatical to answer “-ed” to indicate that you already walked the dog.
Likewise, the bit that’s spelled –s or –es (and pronounced a few different ways) has a consistent meaning in many different words, like carrots, bananas, books, skates, cars, dishes, and many others. Like –ed, it is not free: it can’t appear in isolation. It’s a bound morpheme too.
If a word is made up of just one morpheme, like banana, swim, hungry, then we say that it’s morphologically simple, or monomorphemic.
But many words have more than one morpheme in them: they’re morphologically complex or polymorphemic. In English, polymorphemic words are usually made up of a root plus one or more affixes. The root morpheme is the single morpheme that determines the core meaning of the word. In most cases in English, the root is a morpheme that could be free. The affixes are bound morphemes. English has affixes that attach to the end of a root; these are called suffixes, like in books, teaching, happier, hopeful, singer. And English also has affixes that attach to the beginning of a word, called prefixes, like in unzip, reheat, disagree, impossible.
Some languages have bound morphemes that go into the middle of a word; these are called infixes. Here are some examples from Tagalog (a language with about 24 million speakers, most of them in the Philippines).
| [takbuh] | run | [tumakbuh] | ran |
| [lakad] | walk | [lumakad] | walked |
| [bili] | buy | [bumili] | bought |
| [kain] | eat | [kumain] | ate |
It might seem like the existence of infixes is a problem for our claim above that words are inseparable. But languages that allow infixation do so in a systematic way — the infix can’t be dropped just anywhere in the word. In Tagalog, the position of the infix depends on the organization of the syllables in the word.
4.3.2: From 6.2 Allomorphs, in Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics
The previous unit showed us that a morpheme is the smallest unit that pairs a consistent form with a consistent meaning. But when we say that the form of a morpheme is consistent, there’s still some room for variability in the form. Think back to what you know about phonology and remember that a given phoneme can show up as different allophones depending on the surrounding environment. Morphemes work the same way: a given morpheme might have more than one allomorph. Allomorphs are forms that are related to each other but slightly different, depending on the surrounding environment.
A simple example is the English word a. It means something like “one of something, but not any particular one”, like in these examples:
a book
a skirt
a friend
a phone call
But if the word following a begins with a vowel and not a consonant, then the word a changes its form:
an apple
an ice cream cone
an iguana
an idea
The two forms a and an are slightly different in their form, but they clearly both have the same meaning. And each one shows up in a different predictable environment: a before words that start with consonants and an before words that begin with vowels.
Another example of allomorphy in English is in the plural morpheme. In written English, the form of the plural morpheme is spelled -s, as in:
carrots
books
hats
friends
apples
iguanas
But it’s spelled –es in words like:
churches
bushes
quizzes
And in fact, even in the cases where it’s spelled -s, it’s pronounced as [s] for words that end in a voiceless segment (carrots, books, cliffs) and as [z] for words that end in voiced sounds (worms, dogs, birds). So it’s got two written forms (-s and -es) and three spoken forms ([s], [z], [ɨz]), but a consistent meaning of “more than one”. Each form is an allomorph of the plural morpheme. Can you figure out what the relevant environment is that predicts which allomorph appears where?
4.3.3: From 6.3 Inflectional Morphology, in Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics
Video Script
We saw in our last units that words can be made up of morphemes, which are the smallest linguistic unit that links form with meaning. Morphemes can do a couple of quite different jobs in a word.
Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that add grammatical information to a word. When a word is inflected, it still retains its core meaning, and its category stays the same. We’ve actually already talked about several different inflectional morphemes:
The number on a noun is inflectional morphology. For most English nouns the inflectional morpheme for the plural is an –s or –es (e.g., books, cars, dishes) that gets added to the singular form of the noun, but there are also a few words with irregular plural morphemes. Some languages also have a special morpheme for the dual number, to indicate exactly two of something. Here’s an example from Manam, one of the many languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. You can see that there’s a morpheme on the noun woman that indicates dual, for exactly two women, and a different morpheme for plural, that is, more than two women.
| Manam (Papua New Guinea) | ||
| /áine ŋara/ | that woman | singular |
| /áine ŋaradiaru/ | those two women | dual |
| /áine ŋaradi/ | those women | plural |
The tense on a verb is also inflectional morphology. For many English verbs, the past tense is spelled with an –ed, (walked, cooked, climbed) but there are also many English verbs where the tense inflection is indicated with a change in the vowel of the verb (sang, wrote, ate). English does not have a bound morpheme that indicates future tense, but many languages do.
Another kind of inflectional morphology is agreement on verbs. If you’ve learned French or Spanish or Italian, you know that the suffix at the end of a verb changes depending on who the subject of the verb is. That’s agreement inflection. Here are some examples from French. You can see that there’s a different morpheme on the end of each verb depending on who’s doing the singing.
| French | ||
| 1st | je chante | I sing |
| 2d | tu chantes | you sing |
| 3d | elle chante | she sings |
| 1st | nous chantons | we sing |
| 2d | vous chantez | you (pl.) sing |
| 3d | elles chantent | they sing |
And in some languages, the morphology on a noun changes depending on the noun’s role in a sentence; this is called case inflection. Take a look at these two sentences in German: The first one, Der Junge sieht Sofia, means that, “The boy sees Sofia”. Look at the form of the phrase, the boy, “der Junge”. Now, look at this other sentence, Sofia sieht den Jungen, which means that “Sofia sees the boy”. In the first sentence, the boy is doing the seeing, but in the second, the boy is getting seen, and the word for boy, Junge has a different morpheme on it to indicate its different role in the sentence. That’s an example of case morphology, which is another kind of inflection.
| German | |
| Der Junge sieht Sofia. | The boy sees Sofia. |
| Sofia sieht den Jungen | Sofia sees the boy. |
Check Yourself
- Answer
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"Number."
Hint: If you take off the -es, it makes the base noun singular.
- Answer
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"Tense."
Hint: If you take off the -ed, it makes the base verb present tense (in a way; there is another process going on).
- Answer
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"Case."
Hint: These pronouns are used in different roles in the sentence.
4.3.4: From 6.4 Derivational Morphology, in Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics
Video Script
The last unit talked about inflection, which is one of the jobs that morphology can do. The other big job that morphemes have is a derivation. The derivation is the process of creating a new word. The new, derived word is related to the original word, but it has some new component of meaning to it, and often it belongs to a new category.
One of the most common ways that English derives new words is by affixing a derivational morpheme to a base. For example, if we start with a verb that describes an action, like teach and we add the morpheme –er, we derive a morphologically complex noun, teacher, that refers to the person who does the action of teaching. That same -er morpheme does the same job in singer, dancer, baker, and writer.
| Verb | Suffix | Noun |
| teach | -er | teacher |
| sing | -er | singer |
| dance | -er | dancer |
| bake | -er | baker |
| write | -er | writer |
If we start with an adjective like happy and add the suffix –ness, we derive the noun that refers to the state of being that adjective, happiness.
| Verb | Suffix | Noun |
| teach | -er | teacher |
| sing | -er | singer |
| dance | -er | dancer |
| bake | -er | baker |
| write | -er | writer |
Adding the suffix –ful to a noun derives an adjective, like hopeful.
| Noun | Suffix | Adjective |
| hope | -ful | hopeful |
| joy | -ful | joyful |
| care | -ful | careful |
| dread | -ful | dreadful |
Adding the suffix–ize to an adjective like final derives a verb like finalize.
| Adjective | Suffix | Verb |
| final | -ize | finalize |
| modern | -ize | modernize |
| social | -ize | socialize |
| public | -ize | publicize |
Notice that each of the morphologically complex derived words is related in meaning to the base, but it has a new meaning of its own. English also derives new words by prefixing, and while adding a derivational prefix does lead to a new word with a new meaning, it often doesn’t lead to a category change.
| Prefix | Verb | Verb |
| re- | write | rewrite |
| re- | read | reread |
| re- | examine | reexamine |
| re- | assess | reassess |
Each instance of derivation creates a new word, and that new word could then serve as the base for another instance of derivation, so it’s possible to have words that are quite complex morphologically.
For example, say you have a machine that you use to compute things; you might call it a computer (compute + -er).Then if people start using that machine to perform a task, you could say that they’re going to computerize (computer + -ize) that task. Perhaps the computerization (computerize + -ation) of that task makes it much more efficient. You can see how many words have many steps in their derivations.
An interesting thing to note is that once a base has been inflected, then it can no longer go through any derivations. We can inflect the word computer so that we can talk about plural computers, but then we can’t do derivation on the plural form (*computers-ize). Likewise, we can add tense inflection to the verb computerize and talk about how yesterday we computerized something, but then we can’t take that inflected form and use it as the base for a new derivation (*computerized-ation). Inflection always occurs as the last step in word formation.
- Answer
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"Verb + –ment ➔ Noun."
Hint: Think about the role of assign and the role of assignment.
- Answer
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"Noun + –ful ➔ Adjective."
Hint: Think about the role of skill and the role of skillful.
- Answer
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"Adjective + –ify ➔ Verb."
Hint: Think about the role of simple and the role of simplify.
4.3.5: From 6.5 Inflectional Morphology of Some Indigenous Languages, in Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics
Talking about morphology when your primary language is English is sometimes a little disappointing because English does not have very much inflectional morphology. Many other languages do much more interesting jobs with inflectional morphology. Many of the Indigenous Languages spoken by the First Peoples of what is currently Canada have rich morphological systems that communicate a great deal of information.
Number in Inuktitut
Inuktitut is one of the dialects spoken by the Inuit people who live in the Arctic region. There is a good deal of dialect variation across the Inuit languages. Inuktitut is the variety that is the official language of the territory of Nunavut, and has about 40,000 speakers.
All languages make a distinction between singular and plural nouns, but some languages, like Inuktitut, also use inflectional morphology to indicate dual number when there are exactly two of something, as in the following examples:
| matu | door |
| matuuk | doors (two) |
| matuit | doors (three or more) |
| nuvuja | cloud |
| nuvujaak | clouds (two) |
| nuvujait | clouds (three or more) |
| qarasaujaq | computer |
| qarasaujaak | computers (two) |
| qarasaujait | computers (three or more) |
Subject-Verb Agreement in Inuktitut
The three-way distinction between singular, dual, and plural in Inuktitut applies not only to nouns but also to verbs that agree with their noun subjects:
| nirijunga | I eat |
| nirijuguk | the two of us eat |
| nirijugut | we (three or more) eat |
| nirijutit | you (one of you) eat |
| nirijusik | you two eat |
| nirijusi | you (three or more) eat |
| nirijuq | he or she eats |
| nirijuuk | the two of them eat |
| nirijut | they (three or more) eat |
Animacy in Cree
The Cree languages are the Indigenous languages that have the greatest number of speakers, about 80,000 according to Statistics Canada’s 2016 Census.
You might know a language that categorizes nouns according to their gender, like French, which makes a distinction between masculine and feminine nouns, adjectives, and determiners. Of course, grammatical gender has a quite arbitrary relationship to concepts of social and biological gender. Other languages categorize nouns along different criteria. Cree distinguishes words along a dimension called animacy. The animacy distinction is approximately related to whether something is alive or not, but the categories for animate vs. inanimate things are somewhat arbitrary, just the like the categories for masculine vs. feminine things in languages that mark grammatical gender. The animacy of a noun affects which demonstrative determiners may be used with it, the form of the plural morphology, and the morphology of the verb that agrees with it.
In Plains Cree (Nêhiyawêwin), the noun atim (dog) is animate, while astotin (hat) is inanimate. The sentences below shows how the noun’s animacy affects the other words in the sentence.
| animate | inanimate | |
| singular | atimdog | astotinhat |
| plural | atimwakdogs | astotinahats |
| singular demonstrative | awa atimthis dog | ôma astotinthis hat |
| plural demonstrative | ôki atimwakthese dogs | ôhi astotinathese hats |
| singular transitive verb | niwâpamâw atim.I see a dog. | niwâpahtên astotinI see a hat. |
| plural transitive verb | niwâpamâwak atimwak.I see dogs. | niwâpahtên astotinaI see hats. |
Pronouns
All languages make at least a three-way distinction among pronouns — the first person (I/me in English) is the person talking; second person (you) is the person being addressed, and third person (she, he, they, it, etc.) is anybody or anything else. Some languages make even more distinctions in pronouns.
In Ojibwe (Anishnaabemowin), which has about 20,000 speakers, there are two pronouns for the first-person plural. The pronoun niinwi refers to the speaker plus other people but not the person being addressed (that is, “we but not you”). This is known as the exclusive we. The pronoun for inclusive we (“all of us including you”) is kiinwi. The distinction between inclusive and exclusive we is sometimes referred to as clusivity.
Cree also makes an inclusive/exclusive distinction in the first-person plural. The inclusive form is niyanân and the exclusive form is kiyânaw.
Subject-Verb Agreement in Cree
In the third person, Cree makes a distinction between proximate and obviative third person. You might think of this distinction as something similar to the near/far distinction between this and that in English, where this is used for something that is closer to the speaker and that is for something farther away. But, like in English, the proximate/obviative distinction is not just about physical distance; it can also allude to distance in time, or within a conversation, to someone that has been mentioned recently (proximate) versus someone that is being mentioned for the first time (obviative). The distinction is marked on the verbal morphology, as illustrated below:
| proximate | Regina wîkiwak. They live in Regina. |
kiskinwahamâkosiwak. They are in school. |
| obviative | Regina wîkiyiwa. Their friend/someone else lives in Regina. |
kiskinwahamâkosiyiwa. Their friend/someone else is in school. |
These few examples illustrate that the rich morphological systems of these languages can communicate a great deal of information efficiently.