词汇学 Morpheme 13 Sep 2010.pptVIP

A word and its parts: roots, affixes and their shapes Morphemes (1) Vice-President Gore is likely to use deliberately un-Clintonish electioneering tactics. (2) It will be interesting to see how quickly President Putin de-Yeltsinises the Russian government. (3) The current emphasis on rehabilitative goals in judicial punishment may give rise to an antirehabilitationist reaction among people who place more weight on retribution and deterrence. Morphology The area of grammar concerned with the structure of words and with relationships between words involving the morphemes that compose them is technically called morphology. Morphe-”form, shape” Morpheme can be thought of as the minimal units of morphology Two characters of morphemes 1. be identifiable from one word to another 2. contribute in some way to the meaning of the whole word Attack, stack, tackle and taxi Is –tack- a morpheme? unClintonish, helpfulness, happiness, sadness How many morphemes do they have? Although morphemes are the parts out of which words are composed, they do not have to be of any particular length Catamaran, knickerbocker Single syllable word: tenths (how many morphemes do it have?) Kinds of morpheme: bound versus free Helpfulness Morphemes: -help, -ful, -ness Which part is the core of “helpfulness” and why? Reasons: 1. help supplies the most precise and concrete element in its meaning. 2. only help can stand on its own. Morphemes that can stand on their own are called free, and ones that cannot are bound. Comparison A. read-able B. leg-ible hear-ing audi-ence en-large magn-ify perform-ance rend-ition white-ness clar-ity dark-en obfusc-ate seek-er applic-ant Kinds of morpheme: root, affix, combining form Of the non-root morphemes in the words that we have looked at so far, those that precede the roo