Bambification

 The mental conversion of flesh and blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing
bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.

(Coupland, 1991)

 What is a word anyway?

 Is it easy to define the concept word? Is the word easily identifiable?

 If you have read the chapter, you must have noticed that it begins with the definiton of a
word you wouldn’t hear everyday. The word is bambification and here is what it means. Any
ideas why the chapter begins with this? What is the message here? We understand what
words mean, even the ones that we do not use every day like bambification. Sometimes it is
not an easy task to define what a ‘word’ is.

 bourgeois 1. A person belonging to the middle class. 2. A person whose attitudes and
behavior conforms to the standards and conventions of the middle class. The word word is a
tricky wor since what you would consider a word in a language may turn out to be not a
word but a sentence. Judeo-Christian - being historically related to both Judaism and
Christianity. The term ‘word’ is hard to define

 What is a word? The smallest meaningful element? ‘Table’ is a word,, we cannot break it into
smaller parts. On the other hand, ‘teacher’ is a word but we could break it into smaller parts
teach+er.

What is Morphology?

 Morph (form) + ology (science of): the science of word forms

 Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are
formed.

 Morphology is a field of linguistics that is concerned with the forms and formation of words
in a language.

 So the sixty-four thousand dollar question is what is morphology? Morphology is the study of
the structure and content of word forms. The study of language at the word level.

 Morphology (biology): Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form
and structure of organisms.

 In many languages, what appear to be single forms actually turn out to contain a large
number of “word-like” elements.

 nitakupenda (Swahili, spoken throughout East Africa)

‘I will love you.’

 Is the Swahili form a single word? If it is a “word”, then it seems to have a number of
elements which are separate “words” in English.

 ni-ta-ku-penda

I-will-you-love
  This Swahili “word” is rather different from what we think of as an English “word”. A better
way of looking at linguistic forms in different languages would be to use the notion of
“elements”, not words!

 George Yule starts off by compaing two quite unrelated languages, Swahili and English. What
is interesting in Swahili is that single forms contain a number of word like elements. It does
look like a single word, there are no spaces in between. It carries a lot of semantic
information. So it looks like a word but in fact it is a sentence and it has small bits and pieces
that carry meaning. So instead of using the term word which is obviously problematic for a
number of reasons, let’s talk about the term ‘elements’ in language. We not only make
words but we also mark words. Needless to say this is also true for Turkish. rather than
depending on identifying only “words”

 What we described as “elements” in the form of a linguistic message are technically known
as morphemes.

What is a morpheme?

 A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.

 The police reopened the investigation.

 How many morphemes does the word reopened have?

 It has three morphemes. One unit of meaning is open, the other one is re- (meaning
“again”) and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed (indicating past tense).

 How many morphemes does the word tourists have?

 Not everything is a word. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful element in a language.

 Morpheme: the smallest unit of speech that can carry meaning (content or function) book-s,
wash-ed

 What is a word? The smallest free form in a language.

 There is one minimal unit of meaning tour, another minimal unit of meaning -ist (marking
“person who does something”), and a minimal unit of grammatical function -s (indicating
plural).

Free and Bound Morphemes

 Morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words are called free morphemes.

 tour, open, stay, cat, mouse, if, I… (they can stand alone)

 What are some examples of free morphemes in English?

 Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs

 table, money, go, swim, old, smart, fast, often, yesterday

 free morphemes can stand alone: cat, mouse, I, if

 bound morphemes cannot: cats, personify, played. These must appear w/ other morphemes
  The free morphemes can generally be identified as the set of separate English word forms
such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs.

 There is one minimal unit of meaning tour, another minimal unit of meaning -ist (marking
“person who does something”), and a minimal unit of grammatical function -s (indicating
plural).

Free and Bound Morphemes

 Morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words are called free morphemes.

 tour, open, stay, cat, mouse, if, I… (they can stand alone)

 What are some examples of free morphemes in English?

 Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs

 table, money, go, swim, old, smart, fast, often, yesterday

 free morphemes can stand alone: cat, mouse, I, ifbound morphemes cannot: cats, personify,
played. These must appear w/ other morphemes .The free morphemes can generally be
identified as the set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs.

 Bound Morphemes cannot stand alone. They are typically attached to another form. Affixes
are bound morphemes.

 re- , un-, -ist , -ed , -s… (they can’t stand by themselves)

 When free morphemes are used with bound morphemes, the basic word form
involved is technically known as the stem.

 un-dress-ed

 un dress ed

prefix (bound) stem (free) suffix (bound)

 care-less-ness

 care less ness

stem (free) suffix (bound) suffix ( bound )

Root and stem: A morpheme to which other morphemes are added. A stem may consist of a single
root, of two roots forming a compound stem, or of a root (or stem) and one or more derivational
affixes forming a derived stem.

Lexical and Functional Morphemes Free morphemes fall into two categories:

 Lexical morphemes are nouns, adjectives and verbs which carry the content of message we
convey. They are called open class of words, since we can add new lexical morphemes to the
language.

 sad, follow, tiger, break, long, look, man  lexical morphemes

 Functional morphemes are the functional words in the language such as

conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. They are called closed class of
words, since we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language.
  and, in, the, but, on, near, above  functional morphemes

 Lexical morphemes carry the semantic content (they are semantically loaded), they undergo
derivation. Semantic meaning vs. grammatical meaning

Derivetional and Inflectional Morphemes

Bound Morphemes can also be divided into two types:

 Derivational morphemes are used to derive new words in the language and are often used to
make words of a different grammatical category from the stem.

 good (adjective)  good + ness (noun)

 care (noun)  care + less (adjective)

 create (verb)  creat + ive (adjective)

 quiet (adjctive)  quiet + ly (adverb)

 happy (adjective)  un + happy (adjective)

do (verb)  re + do (verb)

Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes (cont’d)

 Inflectional morphemes are not used to produce new words in English, but rather to indicate
aspects of the grammatical function of a word.

 Plural, possessive, tense, comparative/superlative markers are Inf. M.

 -s third person singular present She wait-s at home.

 -ed past tense She wait-ed at home.

 -ing progresive She is eat-ing the donut.

 -en past participle She has eat-en the donut.

 -s plural She ate the donut-s.

 -’s possessive Sarah’s hair is short.

 -er comparative Sarah has short-er hair than Sue.

 -est superlative Sarah has the short-est hair.

 Inflectional morphemes (different forms of the same word) are used to show if a word is
plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form.

 Some morphemes look the same but this does not mean that they do the same kind of word.
Ex. teacher => suffix + inflectional / Younger => suffix + derivational

 Q1: Do inflectional morphemes change the grammatical category of a word?

A1:

 Q2: Do derivational morphemes change the grammatical category of a word?

A2:
 Q3: Are the bound morphemes -er in the words teacher and younger identical?

 teach + er  / young + er 

 A1: Never. Old / adj. – old-er / adj.

 book/ noun – book-s / noun

 A2: sometimes or most of the time.

Morphological Description
 Whenever there is a derivational suffix and inflectional suffix attached to the same word,
they always appear in the order below.
 teach + er + s  stem + derivational + inflectional
 Boston + ian + s
 Can you find the free morphemes (i.e. lexical and functional) and bound morphemes
(derivational and inflectional) in the sentence below?
 The girl’s wildness shocked the teachers.
 Inflectional morphemes usually occur outside the derivational ones.

 The (functional), girl (lexical), ‘s (inflectional), wild (lexical), ness (derivational), shock (lexical),
-ed (inflectional), the (functional), teach (lexical), -er (derivational), -s (inflectional).
 A useful way to remember all these different types of morphemes:

Problems in Morphological Description

Unidentifiable or inseperable elements:
 The inflectional morpheme -s is added to cat and we get the plural cats. What is the
inflectional morpheme in the words such as:
 a sheep  sheep
 a man  men, a woman  women
 go  went
 Legal  Is it the same morpheme as in national?
 Solution : A full description of English morphology will have to take into account both
historical influences and the effect of borrowed elements.
 Legal  borrowed from the Latin form of legalis (of the law)
 Law  borrowed into old English from old Norse
 Like real life morphology is not without problems. If you are a morphologist working on
English, you will run into certain problems related to morphology.
Morphemes and Allomorphs
 Just like phonemes (e.g. /p/) have allophones (e.g. [pʰ] and [p]), morphemes have variants
called allomorphs.
 Past Tense in English - past tense morpheme
 Verbs that end in a voiced sound – /d/: agree-d, drag-ged, play-ed
 Verbs that end in a voiceless sound - /t/: work-ed, miss-ed, tape-d
 Verbs that end in an alveolar stop - /əd/: load-ed, estimate-ed, visit-ed
 What is the plural formation rule in English?
What is the plural formation rule in English?
 Plural Form (inflection): plural morpheme /z/ allomorphs {z, s, əz}
 Nouns that end in a voiced sound  /z/: flag-s, game-s, car-s
 Nouns that end in a voiceless sound  /s/: map-s, bank-s, shirt-s
 Nouns that end in a sibilant sound  /əz/: glass-es, watch-es
 The English sibilants are /s, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ/. Sibilants are sounds that are produced by
bringing the tip, or blade, of the tongue near the roof of the mouth and air is pushed
past the tongue to make a hissing sound.