Morphology || Literary Foundation ||
Morphology:-
The systematic study of morphemes or how morphemes join to form words is known as morphology.
The segment of a word is called or referred to as "Morphs".
The term "Morphemes" and "Morphs" are comparable to the terms "Form" and "Substance" which was given by Ferdinand de Saussure.
A Morphemes is a short part of a language that has or meets three criteria:-
- It is a word or a part of a word that has meaning.
- It cannot be divided into the smallest meaningful part.
- It recures in differing verbal environments with relatively stable meanings.
A word is a single unit of language, which means something and can be spoken or written. This single or minimal unit cannot be further subdivided into meaningful units.
It's type:-
Free morphemes- Those morphemes that can stand on their own as independent words are called free morphemes. e.g.- words like unhappy, disregard, boyhood etc. have morphemes such as happy, regard, and boy. They can stand as their own.
Bound morphemes- In unhappy, disregard, boyhood. We have morphemes such as un, dis, and hood. They are always attached to some other words (free morphemes) or do not have independent meanings. Such morphemes are called bound morphemes.
Bound morphemes are also called affixes. Affixes attaches to word called "Base" to form words.
Affixes have two branches (1) Prefixes- that appear at the beginning of the base.
(prefixes) (base)
e.g.- unhappy - un happy
illegal- il legal
disregard- dis regard
enable- en able
immobile- im mobile
(2) Suffixes- that appear at the end of the base.
(base) (suffixes)
e.g.- friendship- friend ship
boyhood- boy hood
nicely- nice ly