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The Morphological Structure of Words

The concept of a word

The concept of a word has been rather difficult to define and there have been many different

attempts to tackle it.

Some classical views state that words are units of sense, but this may not prove very helpful, sincethere are other segments that make sense, but which are made up of more than one word

(proverbs: sleep as a log, make a storm in a teacup), and its not easy to determine boundaries of

such segments. Therefore, a so-called potential pause criterion has been suggested to determine

the boundaries of words, but it would be rather difficult to implement it, due to the need for very

slow speech in such analysis.

Another definition states that words are the smallest units in language that can be used alone as a

sentence.

Fire! People. Wonderful.

This does rule out the usage of particular morphemes , or bits of words as a full-grown sentence,

but should we then allow that elements such as the, his, my, of actually be recognized as words in

English, given the fact that they cannot stand alone in sentences?

One other attempt at defining words was to see them as units that have a fixed internal structure.

The policeman coughed politely.

Smaller elements which constitute this sentence cannot be rearranged in any way, nor can they be

separated by other units. However, the factor of uninterruptability has a limited practical use.

(abso-blooming-lutely).

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Types of words in English

Simple words have a very simple morphological structure and are made up of one free morpheme

to which an inflectional suffix can be added. (table, friend, books, nicer, smallest).

Complex (derived) words have at least one derivational affix as its immediate constituent.

(help|less, lov|er).

Compound words are made up of two or more words. They are very frequent. (text|book, mother-

in-law, foot|ball play|er).

Compound-complex words (derivational compounds) are made up of one compound word and

one derivational affix (out|sed|er, dry|clean|er, ex-house|wife).

Apart from simple words, all other words can be segmented into morphemes.

Bed|room un|believ|able nation|al|ize

Notice the difference between the linear (in nation + al + ize) and structural (in believe + able + un)

attachment of affixes.

Affixes can have the same phonological form but different semantic functions:

1. Speak|er 2. tall|er

Due to the fact that the phonology of the twoer affixes is the same, they are called homophones.

Also, we can have different sounding affixes which express the same or similar meaning:

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Un|important im|possible dis|agreeable

In this case the prefixal morphemes are synonymous.

Allomorphs

The same morphemes do not necessarily have the same sound form; they change their

phonological content depending on the context.

Different forms of a morpheme which appear in different contexts are called morphemic variants.

courage courageous /krid/ /kreid/

Such morphemic variants are always in complementary distribution, which means that only one

variant appears in a certain context. These morphemic variants are called allomorphs.

As seen in the example of /krid/ /kreid/ phonological similarity is not essential for morpheme

membership.

The explanations regarding morphemic variants within the synchronic approach belong to a branch

of morphology called morphophonemics.