Units of Language: "Morphology"
"Words, words, words....." ~Hamlet / Shakespeare
Morphemes -
Morphemes are the hardest to see and in a sense the hardest to learn. They are subtle to the novice eye and often overlooked in native English grammar classes. I did not learn a single morpheme when I was in elementary school, but English has plenty. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful unit of language. Folks spend so much time preoccupied with syllables and with words that they forget about the morphemes, so what is a morpheme? Remember we must be beacons of light to our children and our adult learners of English, so we should show them the language, not just as we know it, and not only as we ourselves learned it, but how they need to hear it. Go for it! Hotdog it! No guts, no glory! Language is not easy, but at least the kids will absorb it, and the adults will put in the extra time learning it and studying it. Most do. I have seen students work through their breaks in a studious fashion in their classes to complete coursework so as to grasp a concept better or to move ahead in ESL/ESOL. Rarely do ELL's do their homework at the last moment. For them and them alone, the pressure is on! Few understand this except for them. Perhaps they will inherit the world, as the old saying goes.
What is a Morpheme?
"Morpheme" derives from an Ancient Greek word meaning form. "morphe" is the Greek work in question, and it is cognate with the Classical Latin word "forma," which means the same thing, "a/the form." Cognate is synonymous with, "sharing the same ancestral word." Cognate words are, essentially and literally, "known" to one another, cf. English "cognizant." In a more immediate sense to most of us, these words are etymologically related to one another. That makes more sense to us. English "mother," Swedish "moder," German "muder," are all cognates to Proto-Germanic, or just the Germanic substrate that led to the modern languages. English "fish" is cognate with Swedish "fisk," and on and on. The Latin cousin for these here words are "mater," for mother, and "piscis," for fish. These Latin "cousin words" are also cognates, and, well, because they are more distantly related to the Germanic words, their greater degree of differentiations puts their common ancestor further back in time, at something called Proto-Indo-European, or just Indo-European. Indo-European languages are famous for their morphemes, and English, even though it is an analytic language (sense is based on word order, not word-endings), contains in its realm a proliferation of morphemes. In terms of Germanic languages, German itself is largely agglutinative, like a number of Native American languages, by the way, but this is largely irrelevant to English unless our ELL students are German or Native North American. So it is less important to me exactly how the morphemes are formed cross-linguistically. I would not even be concerned with synthetic vs. analytic types of morphemic languages. For the record synthetic ones are like Old English, Middle English, Latin, Greek (all varieties), Rumanian, Russian, Baltic languages, German, and many many others; they have less predictable word order (yet still meaningful as such) and a great number of noun and verb endings, less or more so, that determine the very function of the word itself in a phrase and the sentence. Therefore, it is my opinion, having said the above, that it is more important to learn morphemes by pure induction, not by deduction. That translates into "We need to roll us our sleeves and get to work on them."
Closed Class of Morphemes in English (par exemple)
the of and to a(n) [allomorphs] These are the most frequent words in American English. |
Open Morphological Class in English (par exemple)
mother father friend love have go |
Inflectional Morphemes Attach to Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives
-s (noun plural) -s (noun possessive and possessive plural) -s (verb third person singular, standard English variety) -ing (verb present participle) -ed (verb past tense) -er & -est (adjective comparative and superlative) |
Derivational Morphemes Alter the Part of Speech of their Word
-ship (NOT an example!!) friend (noun) becomes friendship (noun again) -ness: so friendly becomes friendliness (and note original "friend"!) -y: so love becomes lovely |
Closed class morphemes are invariant; they don't change. Open class morphemes are flexible. Their stem can change, and/or they can add endings, sometimes all at once. Take the example, "break", whose past participle (see syntax) is "broken." It's worth saying that the closed morpheme class does admit new members, ever. It's just a rule of thumb. The open class not only adds members every day, but it is semantically flexible. "Mother" is not just a noun, but at some point, some one said, "I'm mothering you," as a verb (with endings!), and it caught on. This is not exactly semantics, but we shall get into that again.
One more definition for the teacher: free morphemes can be words; bound morphemes cannot be words, and must attach to a word, sometimes once, sometimes reduplicatively, and sometimes several at once. Can you think of examples? This set of classes cross-sections with other classes; it is an overarching definition for grammarians. Many games can be made out of morphological processes. In fact, this is what fluent, native speech is all about. Let us look an an example from recent English history, however. What do you think the British word "pub " comes from? Www.etymonline.com (itself a sort of blending, in the middle part of the title) says that this word comes from 19th-century slang for "public house." There is more there, if you wish to research it. If you agree with the derivation given, this would be a "clipping." Etymology is a science at best, a study, at least. Let's move on to syntax proper, that elusive chameleon of our language.