article navigation

• Introduction
• English Morphology

other articles

• Conlanging
• Gesture Studies
• Historical Linguistics
  • Language Families
• Morphology
• Phonology
• Semantics
• Sociolinguistics
• Syntax
• Other Fields

morphology

introduction

Morphology is the study of word formation. It takes a look at how words are formed in languages and the various methods that are used to achieve this. As native speakers of English, we have intuitive knowledge about how to form words, even if we don't understand the way that it works. Morphologists look at the way that we form words to see the underlying rules and patterns in our minds about word formation.

For example, if I were to give you a made-up word like "mot" (see my Phonology vowel comparison chart), what would the plural of "mot" be? It would probably be "mots." But how do you know to do that? Well, it's because you have an English rule in your mind about how to form plurals in English. The word "mot" fits a certain criteria for you to simply put an -s at the end of the word to make it "mots."

However, morphology is more complicated than that, of course. Given the example I just supplied, would you consider "mot" and "mots" two separate words or one word? It's a bit of a tricky question. The answer is that "mot" is the root word while the -s is a suffix. I'm sure you've heard the term suffix before. Words like "walks" and "walked" have suffixes, -s, and -ed. Suffixes are just one of the many ways that we use to form words and to denote grammatical structure.

Morphologists call these bits of language morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest units of language that have their own meaning. This means that "walk," "-s", and "-ed" are all morphemes of English. Prefixes like "re-" and "pre-" are also morphemes of English that go to the front of the word like "recharge" and "pre-algebra." Words are therefore one or more morphemes that can stand on their own in a language.

English Morphology

English as a language in general is not nearly as interesting morphologically as other languages in the world. This is because English has relatively little inflectional morphology. Inflectional morphology is what expresses grammatical distinctions, such as number (singular vs plural), tense (past, present, future), person (first, second, third), and case (subject, object, possessive). In English, grammatical distinctions such as these are mostly on verbs, but there are not a lot of them.

Let's take the verb "walk" again. The first person singular present tense of walk is "walk." Second singular person present tense is "walk." Third person singular present tense is "walks." (I walk, you walk, he/she walks). The only distinction here is the "-s" suffix in third person persent tense. Otherwise, the only way we know who is walking is by the pronoun. However, other languages are much more interesting in this respect. Take Spanish for example:

Now Spanish has three inflection endings for "caminar" - "-o", "-as", and "a." Each of them denote the first, second, or third person singular respectively. Spanish, however, takes it even further.

Notice that Spanish has introduced two more inflectional endings "-amos" and "-an" while "-a" gets an additional meaning. Look at this compared to English, where the plural version of walk in first, second, and third person is all the same. In this fashion, inflectional morphology is much more interesting to study in other languages!

However, English does have a very interesting plural system, despite us forming more than one "mot" as "mots." In fact, a relatively regular question that native speakers ask is why the plural of "foot" and "goose" are "feet" and "geese" respectively. Well, the answer comes in their earlier forms. The older form of "foot" was "fot" and "goose" was "gos" while their plural forms were "foti" and "gosi" respectively. However, during the evolution of English, the "o" vowel in "foti" and "gosi" changed to "e" thus making them "feti" and "gesi." Over time, the "-i" inflectional ending in English was lost, thus leaving them "fet" (eventually "feet) and "ges" (eventually "geese").

Information from Introducing Morphology by Rochelle Lieber.