Page 292 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes We can further review the examlple of morphemes in the following manner”:
Bound Mophemes

Suffix

Words Free Prefix Derivational suffix Inflectional

Morpheme Class Class Suffix
(root) maintaining changing

Pre-establishment [establish] [pre-] -ment
ment
Establishmentarianism [establish] -arian
—ism
Prenominalizations [nominal] [pre] [-iz [-s]
-ation]
Principalships [principal] [ship] [-s]

(d) Bound Bases: Bound bases are those morphemes which serve as roots for derivational forms
but which never appear as free forms. In words such as conclude, preclude, include, exclude,
the clude is a bound base; and so is the -ceive in receive, perceive, deceive.
Compounds

A compound is a lexical unit in which two or more lexical morphemes (free roots) are juxtaposed, e.g.
aircraft, textbook, white-cap, slow-down, bed-side, fingerprint.
Idioms

An idiom is a phrase the meaning of which cannot be predicted from the individual meanings of the
morphemes it comprises. Idioms are complex lexical items; it is difficult to translate them from one
language into another; they have culturally determined meanings. Most idioms are ‘frozen metaphors’,
their meanings must be learnt as a whole, e.g. give way, in order to.
21.8 Phonological Semantic and Syntactic Considerations in
Morphemes

In the determinations and identification of morphemes all these considerations help a great deal.
When a person learns a morpheme, he has to tie together three kinds of information: phonological,
semantic, and syntactic. Morphs like meet and meat will have the same phonological representation/
mi:t/, they have to be distinguished on the basis of meaning and usage. Some morphemes are
semantically empty, ‘to’, for example, in I want to sleep, has no obvious meaning. A morpheme is
not fully defined by its semantic and phonological properties alone. It also has syntactic properties,
some syntactic representation that determines how it functions with respect to the grammatical
processes of the language. Rat, for example, can function only as a noun, and never say, as an adjective
or as a verb. Thus the sentencses that fat rat jumped upon the table is a grammatical construction
but that the rat fat jumped upon the table is not a grammatical sentence. Therefore, morphemes are
“bundles of semantic, phonological, and syntactic properties.”

21.9 Morphophonemics
The analysis and classification of the different phonological shapes in which morphemes appear, or
by which they are represented, both in an individual language and in languages in general, is often
called morphophonemics or morphophonology. So morphophonemics is a kind of code to represent
morphemes in phonemic shapes. The morphophonemic of a language is never so simple. There are
always many instancess of two or more morphemes represented by the same phonemic shape as

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