Morphology Summary

Morphology Summary
Chapter III
A word and its part: roots, affixes and their shapes

 Smaller part of word generally called by morpheme
 Morpheme can be thought of as the minimal unit of morphology
 Morphemes have two characteristic. First, morphemes must be identifiable from one word to another word. Second morphemes must be contributed in some way to the meaning of the whole word.
 Allomorph concerned as it is with differences in how a morpheme is pronounced
 The identification of morpheme dependent on their meaning.
 Morphemes are not merely the smallest units of grammatical structure but also the smallest meaningful units.
 A complex word may consist
1. free + bound
2. bound + bound (free root and bound root)
3. free + free
 In the native Germanic portion of vocabulary, the roots of a complex word usually free. Of the non-root morpheme in the words that we have looked at so far, those that precede the root (like en-in enlarge) are called prefixes, while those that follow it are called suffixes (like –ance in performance, -ness in whiteness, and -able in readable). We have encountered far more suffixes than prefixes, and that is not an accident: there are indeed more suffixes than prefixes in English. An Umbrella term for prefixes and suffixes (broadly speaking, for all morphemes that are not roots) is affix.
 Affixes are necessary bound.
 Affixes are indeed always bound, but it is not the case that roots are always free
 Prefix root-combinations: the prefixes and roots that they comprise are identifiable without reference to meaning.
 Lexical conditioning to which these morphemes are subject is of a particularly strong kind: none of them ever occurs except in complex words that require dictionary listing.