The grammatical description of many, if not all, languages is conveniently divided into two complementary sections: morphology and syntax. Morphology accounts for the internal structure of words. In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context.It also explores the internal structure of words,and the rules by which words are formed.In this passage, I illstrate morphology in several aspects,from the inside formation , the rules of formation.and the main branches of morphology.
Many people think of words as the basic meaningful elements of language ,many words can be broken down into still smaller units,called morphemes. Morphemes serve different purposes. Some derive new words by changing the meaning or the part of speech,others only refine and give extra grammatical information about the already existing meaning of a word. As morphemes are pairings of sounds with meanings,there are many complexiities involved, forming a new field by the mane morphophonology. Words could be analyzed into smaller components as they are formed by smaller units. Such as chairman,it is made up of chair and man ,words like boys ,checking ,and disappointment can likewise be further analyzed. They are each made up of boy and –s ,check and –ing ,and dis-. Appoint, and – ment. These smaller compoents are known as morphemes. But they themselves cannot be further analyzed. Chair could not be analyzed into ch and air .There are no relations between the parts ch ,air and the whole chair. Another example, the word “unacceptability” can be divided into un-, accept, abil-, and -ity (abil- being a variant of -able). Of these, at least three are minimal grammatical units, in the sense that they cannot be analyzed into yet smaller grammatical units—un-, abil-, and ity. So morpheme is the smallest unit of language in terms of the relationship between expression and content, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning ,whether it is lexical or grammatical.
Although I have mentioned above that morphemes are the smallest units of language in the certain situation. It self could be sub-classified into different types, depending on different criteria.
(1)Free morpheme and bound morpheme
An important concept in grammar and, more particularly, in morphology is that of free and bound forms. A bound form is one that cannot occur alone as a complete utterance (in some normal context of use). For example, -ing is bound in this sense, whereas wait is not, nor is waiting. Any form that is not bound is free.Those appear alone, or which may make up words by themselves ,are free morphemes, such as apple,open are free morphemes, or mono-morphemic words. And we could simply say that all mono-morphemic words are free morphemes. Moreover, poly-morphemic words, which consist wholly of free morphemes are called compound, such as headmaster, silkscalf. In contrast, -s in words , ad in adhere must appear with at least another morpheme are called bound morphemes.
(2)Root ,affix and stem.
We have met poly-morphemic words in the paragraphs mentioned above. In this section ,they ,other than compounds ,can be divided into roots and affixes. Root is the base form of a word that cannot be further be analyzed without destroying its meaning. In other words, it is that part of the word that is left when all the affixes are removed. While the affix is the collective term for the type of morpheme that can be used only when added to another morpheme.(root or stem)., so an affix is naturally bound. It is subclassified into three types namely, prefix, suffix and infix, depending on the position around the root or stem of a word.
(3)Inflectional affix and derivational affix.
This distinction is sometimes known as a distinction between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. Both are concerned with affixes only: root could not be divided into inflectional and derivational ones. Inflectional affixes are generally less productive than derivational affixes: they are very often add a minute or delicate grammatical function to the stem, for instance the inflectional affixes in words such as ways .They serve to produce different forms of a single lexeme. Secondly, inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the word they attach to ,such as bed and beds. whereas derivational affixes might or might not ,such as the relation between brother and brotherhood for the latter.
To be more specific and precise, two fields that morphology is concerned with, that is the study of inflections (inflectional morphology ) as exampled by apple +-s , and the study of word formation (lexical or derivational morphology) as in classify (class +- ify) .The inflection indicates the grammatical relations by inflectional affixes, uch as aspect , number ,person. While the formation in restricted sense refers to the process of how words are formed. Two sub- types are further divided as compound and derivation.
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s affixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases considered "regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", are called allomorphy.
Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃɪz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.
Now, there are still many questions in the morphological field ,so in order to get those problems through ,we need to appeal to the joint venture of the two level of morpholgoy and phonology, that is morphophonolgoy. This emerging branch of linguistics refers to the analysis and classfication fo the phonological factors that affect the morpheme forms and crospondingly , the morphological factors that affect the phoneme forms. In other words, the exploration of ther relations between morphology and phonology.下载本文
