Studia grazie alle numerose risorse presenti su Docsity
Guadagna punti aiutando altri studenti oppure acquistali con un piano Premium
Prepara i tuoi esami
Studia grazie alle numerose risorse presenti su Docsity
Prepara i tuoi esami con i documenti condivisi da studenti come te su Docsity
Trova i documenti specifici per gli esami della tua università
Preparati con lezioni e prove svolte basate sui programmi universitari!
Rispondi a reali domande d’esame e scopri la tua preparazione
Riassumi i tuoi documenti, fagli domande, convertili in quiz e mappe concettuali
Studia con prove svolte, tesine e consigli utili
Togliti ogni dubbio leggendo le risposte alle domande fatte da altri studenti come te
Esplora i documenti più scaricati per gli argomenti di studio più popolari
Ottieni i punti per scaricare
Guadagna punti aiutando altri studenti oppure acquistali con un piano Premium
Introduzione schematica della morfologia in inglese.<br />
Tipologia: Appunti
1 / 7
Questa pagina non è visibile nell’anteprima
Non perderti parti importanti!
Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. A word is any unit of language that, in writing, appears between spaces or between a
space and a hyphen. Words in a language consist of one or more elements of meaning which are called morphemes.
A morpheme is defined as 'the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning'. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.
Morphemes can be divided into two categories: free and bound.
A free morpheme is a grammatical unit that can occur by itself, that means can stand alone as an independent word.
A bound morpheme is a grammatical unit that never occurs by itself, but is always attached to some other morpheme
e.g. house free morpheme houses ( house + s) free + bound morpheme
Free morphemes can be subdivided into two categories: lexical morphemes and inflectional morphemes:
Not only free morphemes are subdivided, there is a similar situation with bound morphemes which are subdivided into derivational and inflectional morphemes.
Example: old + er = older
adj.+suffix = adj.
Morph, allomorph and zero morph
A morph is simply the phonetic representation of a morpheme. This distinction occurs because the morpheme can remain the same, but the pronunciation changes. The best example of this is the plural morpheme in English '-s'.
'-s' is the morpheme, but the morph changes in different words:
Cats - '-s' morpheme is pronounced /s/ Dogs - '-s' morpheme is pronounced /z/
These various pronunciations are the morphs of the morpheme '-s'.
This leads to what an allomorph is. Allomorphs are the varieties of a morpheme, which is closely related to the morph. The morph is just how you pronounce the morpheme, the allomorph is the different realizations in pronunciation of the same morpheme.
So, the morpheme '-s' (plural) has two allomorphs with the morph /s/, /z/.
Zero morphs
A zero morph is a morph consisting of no phonetic form that means it’s not represented. A zero ( Ø ) is often used to indicate the “invisible” morph.
two cats = (ROOT) + -s (PLURAL) two sheep = (ROOT) + Ø (PLURAL)
The relationship between a morpheme and its morphs and allomorphs is parallel to the relationship between a phoneme and its phones and allophones.
A morpheme is manifested as one or more morphs (surface forms) in different environments. These morphs are called allomorphs.
A phoneme is manifested as one or more phones (phonetic sounds) in different environments. These phones are called allophones.
Derivational Morphology
Derivational morphology is a process to create new words out of old elements by adding affixes, compounding or converting a word of one syntactic category from another, sometimes with a shift in meaning.
One of the primary functions of derivational morphology is to change the syntactic category of a word.
Affixation is a word-formation process which adds an affix to a attached to a root or stem. Linguists use the term affix to describe where exactly a bound morpheme is
Jackson, H. ( a.a. 2009/10) “Analyzing English - Study Pack
5” in Lingua e Linguistica Inglese 1 anno, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale ”, Napoli, pp.109-129.
Frank, T. ( 1999) Introduzione allo studio della lingua
inglese, Il Mulino, Bologna, pp.70-
Carstairs-McCarthy, A. ( 2002) An Introduction to English Morphology - Words and Their Structure, Edinburgh University Press
Sources :
http://davidbrett.uniss.it/morphology/index.html
http://www.alphadictionary.com/directory/ Specialty_Dictionaries/Linguistics/
http://www2.let.uu.nl/Uil-OTS/Lexicon/
