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Digvijay Pandya, LPU Unit 22: Morphological Analysis (Identification of Morphemes and Allomorph)

Unit 22: Morphological Analysis (Identification of Notes
Morphemes and Allomorph)

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
22.1 The Atoms of Words
22.2 Morphological Operations
22.3 Morphological Typology
22.4 Summary
22.5 Key-Word
22.6 Review Questions
22.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Understand the Atoms of Words
• Discuss Morphological Operations
• Explain Morphological Typology
Introduction

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given
language’s morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/
stress, or implied context (words in a lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology).
Morphological typology represents a method for classifying languages according to the ways by
which morphemes are used in a language—from the analytic that use only isolated morphemes,
through the agglutinative (“stuck-together”) and fusional languages that use bound morphemes
(affixes), up to the polysynthetic, which compress lots of separate morphemes into single words.
While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that
in most languages, if not all, words can be related to other words by rules (grammars). For example,
English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related—differentiated only by
the plurality morpheme “-s”, which is only found bound to nouns, and is never separate. Speakers of
English (a fusional language) recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of
word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats’, similarly, dog is to
dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher, in one sense. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific
patterns, or regularities, in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller
units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of
word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the
knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
A language like Classical Chinese instead uses unbound (“free”) morphemes, but depends on post-
phrase affixes, and word order to convey meaning. However, this cannot be said of present-day
Mandarin, in which most words are compounds (around 80%), and most roots are bound.
In the Chinese languages, these are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the
language. Beyond the agglutinative languages, a polysynthetic language like Chukchi will have words
composed of many morphemes: The word “t mey ŋ levtp γ t rk n” is composed of eight
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