"Write a morphological analysis of the following words of English: nationalisation; breadth; tomorrow; cooker; this; burnt; entreaty; unmindful; obstruction; scientific; prejudge; presume."

Christian Asseburg, 25 November 1998

Please state your source when quoting.

Introduction to Morphology

Morphology may be defined as the study of the words of a language and their internal structure. A morphological analysis aims to break up words into smaller constituents, as do phonology and phonetics. In morphology, however, each of these smallest units, called morphemes, is required to have a well-defined meaning of its own.

One of the main tools that a morphologist uses to discover those morphemes that combine to form a single word is motivated by the preceding definition of a morpheme. By finding similar words that share some of the components, he may be able to assign individual meanings to each of them. For example, in mistrust, misspelt, mismatched, the common element mis- seems to mean "not" or "not properly". This observation justifies the idea of calling mis- a morpheme, i. e. a minimal meaning-bearing unit of language.

Often, it is possible to discover morphemes simply by introspection. For example, bookshelf can be conceived of as expressing the combined meaning of the morphemes book and shelf, which are also words in their own right. This approach, however, cannot be justified formally as it fails to discover many subunits of words that are meaningful within the word, yet never appear as words on their own, such as mis- in the above example.

Morphological Analysis of the Given Words

nationalisation

The word nationalisation may be broken up into units nation-al-is- ation, since there exist words nation, national, nationalise, nationalisation, each with a separate meaning. Yet these meanings are obviously related to the concept of "nation", which motivates us to call nation the root of the word nationalisation. The unit nation is a single morpheme as it is impossible to break it up into any smaller meaningful parts.

This example illustrates the concept of affixation, commonly found in languages. There exist many words which are derived from other words or morphemes by the addition of other morphemes at either end, or even inside a morpheme itself. Morphemes such as un- or mis-, which attach at the beginning of words, are called prefixes, and morphemes that go at the end of words, such as -al, -ise, -ation in the example above, are called suffixes.

Another important distinction within morphology is that between free and bound morphemes. In the word nationalisation, only the morpheme nation may occur as a word on its own, whereas -al, - ise, and -ation never stand alone. Morphemes that may appear as complete words are called free morphemes, and other words, for example most affixes, are bound morphemes.

With affixes in particular, one may find that morphemes differ in another regard, too. Some morphemes can freely be used to produce new words from given morphemes, and these may be applied to almost any word of a given word class. These inflectional morphemes are commonly used in languages to account for the application of grammatical changes to morphemes within a sentence. In English, a very common inflectional suffix is -s, which may be used on almost any noun to form its plural, as in bearers, wings, groves, bridges, etc. Languages usually contain only a limited number of inflectional affixes.

Morphemes that are not inflectional are called derivational. These morphemes, such as -al, -ise, -ation in the word nationalisation, cannot be applied as readily to any morpheme. In the case of -al, for example, which seems to mean "being a/being like/belonging to", I can find some words, such as physical, literal, etc., yet many conceivable combinations do not occur in the English language, such as countryal, sciental, chairal. To emphasise this distinction between derivational and inflectional affixes, the latter are also called productive. However, this is not the only criterion used to tell apart derivational and inflectional morphemes, and the distinction is not always as clear as in the given example.

To conclude the morphological analysis of nation-al-is-ation, I note that nation is the root of the word, and that it occurs in two allomorphs, coincident with a change of stress pattern.

breadth

The noun breadth can be derived from the adjective broad. It thus consists of two morphemes, broad-th, where -th is a bound morpheme that means, roughly, "the state of being...", which is attached to a free morpheme, broad.

This example highlights the morphological idea of allomorphy. Some morphemes do not occur in one single form, but change their phonological shape in different contexts. In the above example, broad clearly is the root of the word breadth, yet its vowel sound has changed. Therefore, we call bread- an allomorph of broad. In this example, broad is the root of breadth, i. e. it contains the principal meaning of breadth. As a root, it is derivational by definition. The second morpheme, -th, is a derivational suffix. It changes the word class from adjective to noun, and it is not productive, as one may only apply it to a very small number of adjectives. To emphasise that the root morpheme undergoes allomorphic changes because of this constellation of morphemes, linguists say that -th morphemically conditions the allomorphy of broad.

Finally, I note that broad is a full lexical word, that is, it has a well-defined meaning, in the sense that it in it is raining does not.

tomorrow

This word consists of the morphemes to-morrow. However, I admit that this word poses rather more complicated questions than the previous words. To begin with, to- in to-morrow would be a bound prefix, maybe even a function word. It is certainly bound, yet to assign it a clear meaning is difficult. Yet, comparing it with to-day and the expression in the morrow, the separation given above seems to be the most reasonable one. Certainly, morrow must be taken as the root of to-morrow, and it is derivational, as is to-, which is certainly not productive.

Given the above uncertainties regarding the meanings of the components of tomorrow, it may be equally possible to defend the view that tomorrow is just a single morpheme, yet I prefer the analysis given above.

cooker

The word cook-er is obviously derived from the verb cook, together with a suffix -er, meaning "someone who does..." Here, cook is a full lexical word, forming the root of cook-er, and the suffix -er is commonly taken to be a derivational suffix, changing a verb into a noun. Cook is a potentially free morpheme, whereas -er is bound.

This example illustrates the difficulty one frequently encounters in distinguishing between inflectional and derivational morphemes. Although traditional morphology tends to call the suffix -er derivational since it changes the word class of the stem to which it is attached, this process is highly productive, and for most native speakers of English, suffixing a verb by -er is the most common way of referring to the agent of an action. These observations, however, suggest that -er be an inflectional affix. On the other hand, this productive mechanism breaks down in some cases, as seen in the pairs to fall - faller, to hint - hinter, or to butch - butcher. Morphemes such as -er are therefore called semi- productive.

One might also argue that -ist, as in typ-ist, is an allomorph of -er, as it seems to have the same meaning. I prefer to take these as separate morphemes, though, as the circumstances that condition the preference of either of these forms are rather obscure.

this

This relates to that in the same way as these relates to those. All of these deictic words share a common initial sound, so it may be appropriate to propose that each of these words consists of two morphemes, th- is. However, I do not believe that a standard native speaker of English would consider these similarities obvious, let alone be able to isolate meaningful components common to this and that. Hence, I consider this to be one single lexical, free, derivational morpheme. There may have been an earlier stage in the development of the English language when the above words were related by obviously derivational or inflectional suffixation, yet this relationship has been lost in subsequent processes of language change. The English language, due to its overall complicated history, is rich in morphological difficulties, which is why it is called morphologically opaque.

burnt

Burnt is an alternative form to the regular past tense form of the verb burn. The bound, inflectional past tense suffix -ed would normally occur as [-d] after voiced consonants, yet burnt has [-t].

There exist two conflicting solutions to this problem. Some linguists consider burn- t to be two morphemes, burn and -ed, where burn conditions a change in -ed. Other linguists consider burnt to be essentially a portmanteau morph, i. e. one morpheme which comprises the meanings of both morphemes burn and -ed. Both approaches are not without problems, though. The first approach fails when word forms are even more irregular, as in the first person singular verb forms, am and was, for which the first theory requires zero allomorphs that do not show at all in the final form of the word. The second theory postulates morphemes inside morphemes, thereby extending the definition of a morpheme to something altogether less intuitive. I think that more research is needed in this area of morphology, before such problems may be considered as solved.

entreaty

Entreat-y consists of two morphemes, the derivational, lexically meaningful root entreat, and a suffix -y, which may be considered to have the meaning "the act of doing". Entreat may not be broken up into en-treat, as there is no obvious relation between the meanings of the verbs treat and entreat.

unmindful

Un-mind-ful has three morphemes. Un- is a bound derivational morpheme, meaning "not", although it is highly productive and could be seen as inflectional. Mind is the derivational, free root morpheme, combining with the derivational suffix -ful, whose meaning is related to "state of containing/possessing/exhibiting..." and which is a lot less productive than un- . Each of these morphemes is fully lexical.

obstruction

Ob-struct-ion contains three morphemes. Ob-struct is the combination of two bound morphemes, ob- and -struct-, and -ion is a bound derivational morpheme that converts a verb into a noun. - ion has several allomorphs, for example -ment as in consignment, or -al as in deferral. From a historical viewpoint in particular, the relation between obstruct, construct, destruct, etc., and also with oppose, is obvious, with ob- and its allomorph op- meaning "against/inbetween".

scientific

Scient-ific contains two morphemes. Scient- is a bound allomorph of the free lexical morpheme science, and -ific is a derivational suffix meaning "pertaining to..." It may be argued that -ific, as a bound suffix creating adjectives from nouns, is allomorphic to other morphs with the same function, as -ic in economic, -ish in foolish, or -al in seasonal, but there probably exist nuances in meaning, and in any case it would be difficult to state which one of these forms appears under which circumstances. Certainly, -ific is not particularly productive.

prejudge

Pre-judge consists of the root morpheme judge, prefixed by a bound affix pre-, which has a lexical meaning of "in advance". This prefix is somewhat more productive than the earlier suffix -ific, yet obviously lacks the ease of use that the agentive suffix -er exhibits, so it must be considered derivational.

presume

Comparing presume with the similar words assume, consume, I can distinguish two morphemes. Pre-sume begins with the same prefix pre- which I mentioned above, but it continues with the bound morpheme -sume. -sume has an allomorph in - sumpt-, conditioned by a following derivational morpheme, as in pre-sumpt- ive, as-sumpt-ion, but not by an inflectional suffix, as in pre-sum- ing or pre-sume-s. Furthermore, the meaning of -sume is not entirely clear, and combined with pre-, its meaning seems to coincide with "assume". I doubt, however, that one can extend this meaning of -sume to include consume, so there may be different morphemes -sume. To summarise, the word presume is interesting as it illustrates the notion of an induced morpheme, i. e. a morpheme that does not appear as a free word, but which still functions as the root of a word.

Conclusion

Morphological analysis is a helpful tool in understanding the internal structures and mechanisms of language, corresponding on a word level to a general scheme within language of breaking down units of language into smaller components, and although this essay does not cover all the processes involved, such as compounding, it gives a general impression of the richness of morphological issues. Similar processes of division of units into smaller parts can be observed in syntax, for example, where sentences are split into functional units, each of which consists of words or morphemes, or in phonology, which analyses the sound groups that combine to make up morphemes and words. In a way, morphological analysis is at the heart of the meaning of utterances in a language, and, by definition, morphology is the most basic level of language study which focuses on meaning.

Bibliography

L Bauer: Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1988.
C Beedham: German Linguistics. Iudicium, Munich, 1995.
F P Dinneen: An Introduction to General Linguistics. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York, 1967.
V Fromkin, R Rodman: An Introduction to Language. Harcourt Brace, Fort Worth, 1998.
P H Matthews: Morphology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974.
R H Robins: General Linguistics. Longman, London, 1989.
A Spencer: Morphological Theory. Blackwell, Oxford, 1991.
G Yule: The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996.

Christian Asseburg, last revision 30 November 1998.