CHAPTER 3

THE STRUCTURE OF WORDS

MORPHOLOGY

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

3.1 INTRODUCTION
 Morphology is:
 The study of the internal structure of words
 The rules that govern the structure
 The ways of creating new words
 The chapter targets at
 The basic notions for morphological analysis
 Different morphological phenomena
By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU
By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU
3.2 MINIMAL BUILDING BLOCKS
 Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit
 => Morphology deals with the analysis of
words into meaningful units

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

 Morpheme properties:
+ contain a meaning
+ cannot be subdivided into smaller
meaningful components
A word of only one morpheme is a
monomorphemic or simplex word
 Ex: shy, dream
A word of two or more morphemes are a
polymorphemic or complex word
 Ex: shyness, dreamless
 The concept of morph
By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU
3.3 TYPES OF MORPHEMES
 Free morphemes: occur on their own with no
attached morphemes
 Bound morphemes: only occur with other
morphemes
 Base and derivative
 Root, prefixes, suffixes

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

3.4 MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF
WORDS

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU
3.5 REALIZATION OF MORPHEMES:
ALLOMORPHS
 Allomorphs are different morphs
representing the same morpheme.
 Phonological conditioning: the distribution
of allomorphs is governed by the sound
structure
 Morphological conditioning: the allomorphy
of morpheme is determined by the affix
that follow the morpheme
By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU
3.6 Morphological process
 Lexeme: words as an abstract unit in the
vocabulary of a language
 Word forms or grammatical forms: the
different grammatically specified forms of
a given lexeme

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

 Inflection: the morphological expression of
grammatical information and categories
 Derivation: The creation of new lexemes by
affixation

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

Properties of affixation

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

3.7 WORD FORMATION
 Word-formation: the strategies of creating
new lexemes in a special area of
morphology
 Affixation = prefixation + suffixation
 Agentive suffix
 Instrumental suffix
 Diminutive suffix
 Gender marking suffix
 Negative prefix vs augmentative prefix
By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU
By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU
COMPOUNDING
 Compounding is combining two or more
words a new words
 Head vs modifiers

Compound: nominal, adjectival, verbal

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

Conversion
 Concatenative vs non-concatenative
process
 Zero-affixation

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

SHORTENING
 Truncation: creating words by deleting a
part of the base word
 Clippings

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

Blends ( Blended words)
 +Deleting parts of both bases or only one
base
 +Combing the remaining parts into new
words

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU
  Abbreviations
 Acronym
 Initialism
 CONCLUSION

By Nguyen Minh Tri - Lecturer of English - FFL - NTTU