MORPHOLOGY

Morphology or morphemic means learning how to form words (word-organization). It is a branch of linguistics which deals with the organization of phonemes into meaningful groups called morphs. A morph is the smallest meaningful part of language.

We can recognize that English word-forms such as talks, talker, talked and talking consist of one element talk, and a number of other elements such as ­–s, -r, -ed, -ing. All these elements are described as morphemes. Morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. From this definition, we can take one example of word reopened. It consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit of meaning of it is open, another is re- which means ‘again’, and the minimal of grammatical function is –ed which indicates the past time.

Varied Types of Morphemes

We can make a clear distinction from the types of morphemes; there is what we call ‘free and bound morpheme.’ Free morpheme can stay by themselves as single words as in the example open and tour. Meanwhile, bound morpheme cannot normally stand alone.

The two types fall into several categories. Free morphemes fall into two categories, the first category is that set of ordinary nouns, and verbs as the words which carry the content of conveyed messages. These free morphemes are called “lexical morphemes” on the examples : boy, house, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look etc. Whereas the other group of free morphemes are called functional morphemes and the examples are Examples are and, but, when, because because, on, near, above, in, the etc. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunction, prepositions, articles and pronouns.

The second one is bound category which can also be divided into two types. They are: derivational morphemes , these are used to make new words in the language and are often used to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. As in the word goodness, it is the changes of the adjective good by addition of -s. this type includes suffixes such as ­–ish in childish, -ly in badly and prefixes such as re- in recalculate, pre-, ex-, dis-, un-,ect.

The second set of bound morphemes contains what are called inflectional morphemes. It is used to show that it is a comparative of possessive form. The examples are that in the use of suffixes –ed to make changed into the past tense form, the use of –s to make the word boy into the plural boys.

One thing to note is that they (derivational and inflectional suffixes) have a basic difference which lies on the changing of the meaning or at least, part of the speech of a word. Derivational suffixes have typical character to change it as –ment added to a verb forms a noun in management. Whereas inflectional suffixes are otherwise, such as in big, bigger, biggest. They all are adjectives.

As it has clearly been pointed out that phonology simply learns the word organization (word formation). It’s to mean that a language is analyzed on the root/ derivational formation of language lexicon including many items that are systematically related to each other.

Furthermore,

The last, it’s important to be noted that the words formed by the combination of bound affixes and free morphemes are the result of the process of affixation. Word affixation….. in which it includes prefixes and suffixes inserted within the root morpheme. Hence, the root morpheme gets a meaningful changed word from the formation processes based on the applicable rules as the examples completely stated above. That’s what we mean as the process of affixation.