Morphology

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Noun

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a person, place, thing, or idea ex: Joanne, the professor, China, satellites, happiness

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Pronoun

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replaces a noun or noun phrase ex: I, he, they, him, you

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Adjective

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modifies a noun or noun phrase and answers the questions: which one, what kind, or how many ex: blue, thoughtful, several, angry

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Verb

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the action or state of being of the subject of the sentence ex: to hit, to bring, to put, to be, to feel

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Adverb

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modifies a verb, adjective, or adverb and answers the questions: how, when, where, or to what extent ex: tomorrow, gently, very, not

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Preposition

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shows a grammatical relationship between a noun and part of the sentence. ex: to, at, in, on, of, for, out, and between.

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Conjunction

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joins two like words or phrases. ex: and, but, or, if, and however.

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Word Classes

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The function of words can also be classified in terms of whether they contribute lexical or semantic content to a sentence, or show the grammatical relationships between words.

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Content Words

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Content words bring meaning to an utterance. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs fall under this category. Also referred to as open class words

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Function Words

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those that show grammatical function such as prepositions, conjunctions, functional adverbs, auxiliary verbs, pronouns, and articles. These are referred to as closed-class, since new words will not be added to these categories.

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Morphemes

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“a minimal meaningful unit.” Unlike words, they may be independent and communicate an idea (free), or dependent and contribute meaning or grammatical function to an idea (bound). Free morphemes can stand on their own as a complete thought or idea (word). These can be any part of speech.

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Derivational

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morphemes derive new meaning and/or change the part of speech. For example, the prefix ‘un-’, when attached to a verb or adjective, derives the opposite meaning.

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Inflectional

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morphemes do not alter meaning or part of speech; rather they show grammatical relationships between words, including mood, tense, person, voice, and aspect for verbs, and gender, number, and case for nouns. When adding the plural morpheme ‘-s’ to a noun, neither the meaning nor the word category change; instead, the resulting word is the plural of the root.

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Word Coinage

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Languages permit the addition (coinage) of new words based on specific constraints or rules

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Blends

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are formed when parts of two words are blended together such as brunch (breakfast + lunch), simulcast (simultaneous + broadcast), and camcorder (camera + recorder)

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Back Formations

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are derived when a syllable or sound is mistaken for an affix and is added to or omitted from a root. For example, the verb ‘to hawk’ was derived from the noun ‘hawker’ when the ‘er’ was mistaken for the agentive affix and removed.

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Clipping

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is a process by which part of a word is used to represent the whole meaning. Examples include: ‘fridge’ for ‘refrigerator,’ ‘phone’ for ‘telephone,’ and ‘Mac’ from ‘Macintosh.

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Eponyms

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are derived from a proper noun which has come to represent all like items. such as ‘kleenex’, ‘jello,’ ‘boycott’ and ‘ohm.’

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Acronyms

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are formed by using the first letter from each word of a phrase to create a word. Examples include ‘scuba’ from Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus and ‘SWAT’ from Special Weapons and Tactics

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Compound

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words are formed from two roots. Both roots can be free, as in the word ‘paperclip’, i.e., a type of ‘clip’ that holds ‘paper’. However certain roots are bound since they bear no meaning outside of the compound word in which they appear, e.g., ‘luke’ in ‘lukewarm’, ‘cran’ in ‘cranberry’

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Language Types

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Languages can be classified based upon the morphological processes used in word/phrase formation.

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Isolating Languages

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(also called analytical languages) are made up of single morphemic words that do not incorporate affixes. For instance, in Mandarin Chinese, plurality is marked by the presence of a free morpheme that means ‘plural.’

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Agglutinating Languages

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morphemes are strung together to create complex words. Any number of morphemes can be added in this way. For speakers of these languages all morphemes bear a single meaning and are easily recognizable

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Fusional Languages

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are generally highly inflective. Words are formed by affixes attaching to stems, but unlike agglutinating languages, morpheme boundaries are not always clear as several morphems may be ‘fused’ together. A fusional affix can carry a single meaning or several, such as person, gender, and number. These languages often have very rich case declensions

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Polysynthetic Languages

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are characterized by incorporating stems and affixes that form nouns into verbal roots. These long and complex words correspond to complete thoughts, being equivalent to sentences in other languages. Polysynthetic languages are found all around the world including Siberia, the Americas, and Oceania.

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Data Analysis

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The methodology involved in morphological analysis depends on the type of data. For example, you will approach an agglutinating language very differently from a polysynthetic language.