Introducing Linguistics Theoretical and Applied Approaches

Chapter 4 focuses on morphology, the study of how words are formed. It explains how words, in spite of the fact that we often think of them as a single unit, can be made up of one or more smaller units referred to as morphemes. It examines different types of morphemes: roots, bases, and affixes. It shows how morphemes can be subdivided into different classes according to their properties: whether they are free, stand-alone morphemes, or bound morphemes (affixes), that must be attached to another morpheme; whether they are suffixes, prefixes, or infixes. The concept of allomorphy, important because it represents an interface between phonology and morphology, is presented and practiced. The chapter shows how different languages can build words in different ways, and how in some languages, a word can translate as a whole sentence in English. Readers will learn that morphemes are put together in words following rules, that is, words have structure. Extensive practice is given on how to represent the structure of words using tree diagrams. Various processes for creating or adapting words are also presented. Finally, an appendix details step-by-step how to build morphological trees.