Chapter 5 Morphology 英语语言学.pptVIP

Chapter 3 Morphology 3.1 Introduction Nothing is more important to language than words. Words carry meaning. They are the fondamental building blocks of a language. book bookish bookable booked bookful bookstore bookhunter Morphology Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed. 3.2 Open class closed class Open class words---content words of a language to which we can regularly add new words, such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, e.g. beatnik (a member of the Beat Generation), hacker, email, internet, “达人，走秀…” in Chinese. Closed class words---grammatical or functional words, such as conjunction, articles, preposition and pronouns. 3.3 Morpheme ---- the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function. ---- the minimal unit of meaning Words morphems ---Words are composed of morphemes. Words may consist of one morpheme or more morphemes, e.g. 1-morpheme boy, desire 2-morpheme boy+ish, desir(e)+ble 3-morpheme boy+ish+ness, desir(e)+bl(e)+ity 4-morpheme gentle+man+li+ness, 5-morpheme un+gentle+man+li+ness 6-morpheme anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism Morpheme morph A morpheme is a meaning and a stretch of sound joined together. A morph is the stretch of sound. e.g. boys John’s the suffix /-z/ Morpheme allomorphs A morpheme may have alternate shapes or phonetic forms. They are said to be the allomorphs of the morpheme, the plural morpheme may be represented by: map----maps [s] dog----dogs [z] watch----watches [iz] mouse----mice [ai] ox----oxen [n] tooth----teeth [i:] sheep----sheep [i:] Each of the underlined part is called an allomorph of plural morpheme. 3.4 classification of morphemes Free morpheme bound morpheme Free morpheme----is one that may constitute a word (free form) by itself, such as bed, tree, sing, dance, etc. Bound morpheme----is one that may appear with at least one other morpheme.