Notes

Knowing words is an intrinsic(important) part of our knowledge of a language. In general(as a general rule: usually;in most situations) How can we analyse the structure of words? dishonnest is attested in English, whereas honestdis is unattested.

 

Morphology: The study of the internal structure of words, the rules that govern it, the ways of creating new words.

Morphology was invented by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to designate (to state officially that a place or thing has a particular character or purpose ; 2.to choose someone officially to do a particular job )

the study of living organisms. Linguists borrowed it from biologists in the nineteenth century and used it to denote the study of linguistic ´organisms`:words.

 

MORPHEMES ARE THE MINIMAL BUILDING BLOCKS.

Morphology deals with the internal structure of words.  How can we analyse this internal structure?

And what are the elements words can consist of?

 

dreamless: dream and   -less

[d-r-i:-m ] is of interest for phonology(the study of sounds in a particular language or in languages generally ) or phonetics(the study of the sounds made by the human voice in speech).

 

WE SHOULD NOT CONFUSE THE MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF WORDS WITH THEIR PHONETIC OR PHONOLOGICAL STRUCTURE.

 

dream  and  -less are both meaningful. Separate sounds have no meanings.

 

A word must consist of at least one morpheme. There are no morphemeless words.

Indeed, we should not confuse the morphological structure of words with their phonetic or phonological structure. What is the difference between  morphological and phonological or phonetic structure? Just have a look at the word dreamless.  The elements dream and less are meaningful. They have a certain meaning. Dream means series of images appearing in the mind during sleep and less means without. By contrast, the seperate sounds d , r , i and m do not have any meaning. Remarkably, the same holds for any other subdivision of this word, as shown below:#

dri, m     dr,i,m      dr,im  these are all meaningless.

In the word dream only the whole unit has a meaning. [dri:m ]

MORPHOLOGY DEALS WITH THE ANALYSIS OF WORDS INTO MEANINGFUL UNITS. Words can be analysed into meaningful units. Such meaningful units are called morphemes. Sounds and  combination of sounds in the word dream are not meaningful units, dream cannot be subdivided further into meaningful parts. This means that dream is the smallest meaningful unit in the word dream. MORPHEME IS THE SMALLEST MEANINGFUL UNIT.

A word must consist of at least one morpheme. There are no morphemeless words.  

Which part in a word is meaningful and what meaning it has is our next question. The word shyness. How can we establish what meaningful units it consists of? We already know the word shy in English and we check its meaning from the dictionary. It means being nervous and embarrassed about meeting and speaking to other people. So we can say that shy in shyness is a  meaningful unit and therefore a morpheme. But what about -ness? There is no such word as ness in English. However, it may come to your mind that there are many words in English that contain the unit

-ness. Sadness, boldness,happiness,etc. We can assume that since this word occurs in quite a number of words, it might be morpheme. To verify this, we should find out whether it has any meaning. How can we do this? We can paraphrase different words containing -ness to see whether - ness contributes any meaning to the overall meaning of these words. To find this out, we should do the parapharse by using the wordsto which - ness is attached. 

shyness   the state or property of being shy

loudness   the state or property of being loud

sadness the state or property of being sad

happiness the state or property of being happy.

As the data shows, the meaning of -ness is the state or property of being X, where it stands for the meaning of the word it is attached to. Therefore, -ness is a morpheme. The morpheme -ness cannot be subdivided any further  into meaningful components.  

Words consisting of one morpheme are called monomorphemic or simplex words.

Those containing two or more morphemes are called polymorphemic or complex words.