Morphology - word construction

What is Morphology?
Morphology: The study of the formation of words

What is a Morpheme?
Morpheme: The smallest mean-ing-ful unit of a word which is encoded by phonemes

Word formation
- simplex words                     → interjections e.g. oh, ah, wow
                                            → car, star, far 
- complex words:
      • derivet words              (stem+affix)         → e.g. unlike, following, happiness
      • compound words        (stem+stem)        → e.g. armchair, maybe
      • synthetic compounds  (derivation+stem) → e.g. bus-driver

Try to define the word word!
- You can define word by giving an ostensive definition → 'car, house, but, it....'

- You can define word by saying: → it has an internal and external structure
                                                → it has a content
                                                → it contains of syllables
                                                → it is the smallest interchangeable unit 

There are two main types of morphemes:

  • lexical morpheme 
    - open set (still new words adding to our vocabulary):
                   –girl, boy, car, box, spoon, grass, sky    • grammatical morpheme:
     - closed set:
                       –free:    prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs
                       –bound: affixes, suffixes (in word formation and inflection) 

  Definitions of words and their parts
   
          
          Examples:
                  - cars, women, bottles
                  - cat, root, touch
                  - touchable, unhappy
                  - water-bottle, arm-chair
                  - thread
                  - untouchable, unforgetable
                  - wine-bottle-opener