Understanding Morphemes and Word Formation in English

Morpheme:

1. It is a lexical item or a meaningful part of a lexical item. 2. It can't be broken down into smaller meaningful parts. 3. It occurs in different environments with no dramatic changes of meaning.

Tipos:

1. Morphemes which have a lexico-semantic meaning content: (beauty), (girl), (walk)... 2. Morphemes having a grammar or functional content (-ful), (-ly), (-s), and (-ed).

However, many English lexical forms can't be accounted for by means of internal division: 1. Irregular plurals forms: feet, men. 2. Irregular comparative and superlative: a. better, best b. worse, worst. 3. Past tense and participial forms: a. bought, took, wrote

Inflectional Morphemes:

1. They don't create a new lexical item but simply another form of the same lexical item (table-tables). 2. They are always placed after derivational morphemes (a. king + -dom + plural: kingdoms) (b. king + -dom + plural: kingsdom**). 3. Are the lexical item final boundaries. They lock the possibility for an item to be morphologically expanded. (a. verb: (verb) b. verbs: (verb)+(plural) c. verbsal: (verb)+(plural)+(-al)*** 5. As a consequence of 1, an inflectional morpheme never changes the form class of the original item to which it is attached (table is a noun and tables too) (write is a verb and writing too). 5. If they are adjoined to a member of a form class, virtually all the fellow members of that class will admit them. Any member of the form class noun will readily admit plural.

Derivational:

1. They always create a new lexical item. Happily is a form which has been created from happy. 2. They can't follow inflectional morphemes. 3. They create a part of speech different from a part of speech of the item to which it was originally attached. Happy= adj and happily= adv. 4. They don't usually close an item (a. verb: verb b. verbal: verb + -al c. verbalise: verb+-al+-ise d. verbalization e. verbalisational*** 5. You can add an inflectional morpheme to all the members of a given class. However, this criterion does not hold true for the derivational.

Word Formation:

1. Acronym: process by means of which a new lexical item is formed from the initial letters of a series of words. Ex: UNESCO, LASER, RADAR (pronounced as a word), VAT (pronounced as a word or as a series of letters), BBC, LA (they are witnessed as abbreviations instead. 2. Blending Word: fusion of the parts of two words, usually the beginning of one word and the end of another. Ex: a. smog: smoke+fog, b. brunch: breakfast+lunch, c. smanglish: Spanish+English. 3. Clipping: this term comes from the shortening of a word. Ex: photograph: photo, telephone: phone. 4. Compounding: this is when two words are put together to form a new word. Ex: black and bird: blackbird. We can found endocentric compound, they are the same category distinction as its head: boyfriend and friend are 2 nouns. And exocentric compounds: they don't display that inclusive semantic relationship. Ex ice cream is not a type of cream. 5. Conversion: is the use of one form which is generally known as belonging to one particular form class as a member of another different class. Ex: better (adj) and better (verb), bottle (noun) and bottle (verb), wolf (noun) and wolf (verb). 6. False Etymology: word may be totally changed in order to make it more understandable. Ex: hamburger: false, it comes from Hamburgo. 7. Neoclassical Compounding: the process by means of which you can compound words where at least one of their elements comes from Greek or Latin. Ex: agriculture or microchip.