Final Test
MORPHEMES
AND TYPE OF MORPHEMES
By
ENGLISH AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT
ADAB AND HUMANITY FACULTY
ALAUDDIN STATE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR
2012
PREFACE
Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim
All praising for Allah, God experienced for its grant from above. We can finish a handing out "Morphemes and type of Morphemes" to become the guidance for student of university and will be not bad read by all educator, teacher and parent for the stock of in developing duty.
This paper is one form of our participation in the realization of development in the field of Scientific Writing among the students. Narrowly, this paper gives a lead in education by utilizing all the capabilities of existing infrastructure to improve performance in order to achieve the hopes and ideals.
We hope to write this paper, to participate in raising the quality of education and learn the spirit of the students are generally at the recent enthusiasm seemed to fade and begins to weaken.
We are of the author to give thanks Thank God and thanks to all those who have helped in resolving this very simple writing. May Allah favor replacing it with bountifully rewarded.
Deficiencies in all things there must be, therefore we as writers are tolerant with open arms, we will accept constructive criticism and suggestions for the perfection of our paper.
Makassar, 03 April 2012
Writer
ii
LIST OF CONTENTS
Pages
Title page………….. ....................................................................................... i
PREFCE ……………. ..................................................................................... ii
LIST OF CONTENTS …................................................................................. iii
CHAPTER I : INTRODUCTION
A. Background ...................................................................................... 1
B. Problem Formulation ........................................................................ 2
C. Purpose and Benefit of Writing. ....................................................... 2
D. Systematic Writing ........................................................................... 2
CHAPTER II : DISCUSSION
A. Definition of Morphemes …............................................................. 4
B. Type of Morphemes ......................................................................... 5
CHAPTER III : CLOSING
A. Conclusion. ....................................................................................... 9
REFERENCE ………...................................................................................... 10
CHAPTER IINTRODUCTION
A. Background
A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word (such as dog, cat, table, book, etc.) or a word element (such as the -s at the end of dogs, the ed at the end of the kicked, etc.) that can't be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Adjective: morphemic.
Morphemes are commonly classified into free morphemes (which can occur as separate words) and bound morphemes (which can't stand alone as words). Morphemes can be divided into two general classes. Free morphemes are those which can stand alone as words of a language, whereas bound morphemes must be attached to other morphemes. Most rootsin English are free morphemes (for example, dog, syntax, and to), although there are a few cases of roots (like -gruntle as in disgruntle) that must be combined with another bound morpheme in order to surface as an acceptable lexical item.
Free morphemes can be further subdivided into content words and function words. Content words, as their name suggests, carry most of the content of a sentence. Function words generally perform some kind of grammatical role, carrying little meaning of their own. One circumstance in which the distinction between function words and content words is useful is when one is inclined to keep wordiness to a minimum; for example, when drafting a telegram, where every word costs money. In such a circumstance, one tends to leave out most of the function words (like to, that, and, there, some,and but), concentrating instead on content words to convey the gist of the message. (Steven Weisler and Slavoljub P. Milekic, Theory of Language. MIT Press, 1999).
For example, a word like 'house' or 'dog' is called a free morpheme because it can occur in isolation and cannot be divided into smaller -meaning units. The word 'quickest'. is composed of two morphemes, one bound and one free. The word 'quick' is the free morpheme and carries the basic meaning of the word. The 'est' makes the word a superlativeand is a bound morpheme because it cannot stand alone and be meaningful."
(Donald G. Ellis, From Language to Communication. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999).
(Donald G. Ellis, From Language to Communication. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999).
B. Problem Formulation
Based on the background of the problems described above, to give an explanation of the principal issues to be discussed.
We as first author will describe the formulation of the problem and the problem definition as follows:
1. Who is Morpheme?
2. How much type of Morphemes?
C. Purpose and Benefits of Writing
In line with the formulation of the problems mentioned above, the purpose of writing this paper is as follows:
1. To know who is Morpheme.
2. To increase our knowledge or our reference about Morpheme!
3. To know how much kind of morpheme!
D. Systematic Writing
Title pages
Preface
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
Title pages
Preface
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
Background
Problem Formulation
Purpose and Benefits Writing
Systematics Writing
Problem Formulation
Purpose and Benefits Writing
Systematics Writing
CHAPTER II DISCUSSION
CHAPTER III CLOSING
Conclusion
Suggestion
Bibliography
Conclusion
Suggestion
Bibliography
REFERENCES
CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
A. Definition of Morphemes
In generative grammar, the definition of a morpheme depends heavily on whether syntactic trees have morphemes as leafs or features as leafs.
b. Direct syntax to semantics mapping.
d. Branches in syntactic trees spell out morphemes: Radical Minimalism and Nanosyntax -leafs are "nano" morpho-syntactic features.
Given the definition of morpheme as "the smallest meaningful unit" Nanosyntax aims to account for idioms where it is often an entire syntactic tree which contributes "the smallest meaningful unit." An example idiom is "Don't let the cat out of the bag" where the idiom is composed of "let the cat out of the bag" and that might be considered a semantic morpheme, which is composed of many syntactic morphemes. Other cases where the "smallest meaningful unit" is larger than a word include some collocations such as "in view of" and "business intelligence" where the words together have a specific meaning.
The definition of morphemes also play a significant role in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following theoretical constructs;
a. Event semantics The idea that each productive morpheme must have a compositional semantic meaning (a denotation), and if the meaning is there, there must be a morpheme (null or overt).
b. Spell-out The interface where syntactic/semantic structures are "spelled-out" using words or morphemes with phonological content. This can also be thought of as lexical insertion into the syntactics.
B. Type of Morphemes
In linguistic terminology the minimal parts of words that we have analyzed above are called morphemes. Morphemes come in different varieties, depending on whether they are
· free or bound and
· inflectional or derivational
a. Free morphemes
Free morphemes can stand by themselves (i.e. they are what what we conventionally call words) and either tell us something about the world (free lexical morphemes) or play a role in grammar (free grammatical morphemes). Man, pizza, run and happy are instances of free lexical morphemes, while and, but, the and to are examples for free grammatical morphemes. It is important to note the difference between morphemes and phonemes: morphemes are the minimal meaning-bearing elements that a word consists of and are principally independent from sound. For example, the word zebra (ˈziːbrə) consists of six phones and two syllables, but it contains only a single morpheme. Ze- and -braare not independent meaning-bearing components of the word zebra, making it monomorphemic. (Bra as a free morpheme does in fact mean something in English, but this meaning is entirely unrelated to the -bra in zebra.)
b. Bound morphemes
Not all morphemes can be used independently, however. Some need to be boundto a free morpheme. In English the information “plural number” is attached to a word that refers to some person, creature, concept or other nameable entity (in other words, to a noun) when encoded in a morpheme and cannot stand alone. Similarly the morpheme -er, used to describe “someone who performs a certain activity” (e.g. a dancer, a teacher or a baker) cannot stand on its own, but needs to be attached to a free morpheme (a verb in this case). Bound morphemes come in two varieties, derivational and inflectional, the core difference between the two being that the addition of derivational morphemes creates new words while the addition of inflectional words merely changes word form.
c. Derivational morphemes
The signature quality of derivational morphemes is that they derive new words. In the following examples, derivational morphemes are added to produce new words which are derived from the parent word.
happy – happiness – unhappiness
frost – defrost – defroster
examine – examination – reexamination
In all cases the derived word means something different than the parent and the word class may change with each derivation. As demonstrated in the examples above, sometimes derivation will not cause the world class to change, but in such a case the meaning will usually be significantly different from that of the parent word, often expressing opposition or reversal.
probable – improbable
visible – invisible
tie – untie
create – recreate
Independently of whether or not word class changes and how significantly meaning is affected, derivation always creates (derives) new words from existing ones, while inflection is limited to changing word form.
d. Inflectional morphemes
Inflection (the process by which inflectional morphemes are attached to words) allows speakers to morphologically encode grammatical information. That may sound much more complicated than it really is – recall the example we started out with.
The word girlsconsists of two morphemes
· the free lexical morpheme girlthat describes a young female human being and
· the bound inflectional morpheme-s that denotes plural number
Examples for the morphological encoding of other grammatical categories are tense (past tense -edas in walked), aspect (progressive aspect as in walking), case(genitive case as in Mike‘s car) and person (third person -sas in Mike drives a Toyota).
You are likely to notice that
· overall, English grammar has fairly few inflections and
· some inflectional endings can signify different things and more than one piece of grammatical information at once
The first point can easily be demonstrated by comparing English with German, which makes more use of inflection. Compare the following two pairs of sentences.
Der Mann sah den Hund
Den Hund sah der Mann
vs.
The man saw the dog
The dog saw the man
If you focus on the meaning of the two German sentences you’ll see that it does not change, even though we’ve changed the word order. The man is still the one who sees the dog, not the other way around. By contrast, the English expression changes its meaning from the first to the second sentence.
Why is this the case? In the German example the definite article is inflected for accusative case (den Hund), telling us who exactly did what to whom. This allows us to play around with the word order without changing the meaning of the sentence. English gives us no way of doing the same. We are forced to stick to a fixed word order due to a lack of case inflection (except for personal pronouns). Languages such as Latin that indicate a high degree of grammatical information via inflection (so-called synthetic languages) generally have a freer word order than analytic languages like English which have only reasonably very few inflections and rely on word order to signal syntactic relations (another popular example for a strongly analytic language is Chinese).
CHAPTER III
CLOSING
A. CONCLUSION
Every morpheme can be classified as either free or bound. These categories are mutually exclusive, and as such, a given morpheme will belong to exactly one of them.
1. Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear with other lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
2. Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes. Bound morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes, their nomenclature derived from the bound, non-affix function of cran- in the word cranberry.
REFERENCE
Stephen C. Behrendt (1992). English Language. London: Macmillan Press.
ISBN 0-312-06835-2.
James King (1991). Linguistic : His Life. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312
07572-3.
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