Understanding Morphological Units: Word Formation

Morphological Units

Morphology requires identifying and describing extra units, which are the PABRA, root, base, and the morpheme.

• Word: Minimal free form. You can change its position in a sentence (but you can change the article by the noun). Its features are:
  • Separability: i.e., between two units, you can add others.
  • Potential pause: prior or posterior that delimits the unit.
  • If bounded by several morphemes, they are inseparable and have a fixed order.
• Root: Is the basic segment or constant in any significant word. It results from removing all morphemes that accompany it.
• Theme: Part of the underlying word for flexion, remaining stable in all the reflexive forms. It is the result of diminishing grammatical accidents. It can be simple or complex.
• Base: It is the constituent of the floor on which there may be a morphological procedure, whether creation or flexion. There may be simple and complex databases.
• Morpheme: The morphological component of the signifier of a minimum word. Types:
  • Morphemes locked and free: Whether they are words alone or not.
    • Free: By themselves, they are words.
    • Locked: Jointly, they are words.
  • Lexical morphemes and grammatical: The morphemes presented serve meaning:
    • Lexicon: (lexical meaning alone, what the words mean)
    • Grammar: (grammatical meaning and/or lexicon. Refers to the linguistic reality or the way it organizes the lexical meaning.
  • Affixes: They are bound grammatical morphemes attached to a lexical base. They can be inflectional (grammatical only, indicating an accident) and derivational (when it forms a new word). There are three kinds of derivational morphemes:
    • Confijos: (continuous segments that do not divide the root, (prefixes and suffixes))
    • Circumfix: (discontinuous segments around the base (parasynthetic words))
    • Infix: (continuous segments that are inserted into a lexical morpheme.)

Inflectional Morphology

It deals with the accidental grammatical variables of words that are manifested through inflectional morphemes.

• Nominal Flexion: Includes changes to nouns and adjectives to express grammatical gender and number.
• Gender Flexion: In Castilian, nouns and adjectives can be masculine or feminine in inanimate nouns (gender non-motivated) and animated (related to sex).