Morphology

Flussdiagrammknoten

• Word Classes 

• Morphemes

• Words need to be placed in a certain order, this help to understand their function and meaning.

• Context is important to understand the meanings and functions of individual words.

• English words fall in two main categories: Content or form words (Major category) and Structure words (Minor category)

• Minor Category 

• Major Category 

• Words that carry the content or esencial meaning: Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs.

• Open word classes

• Words serve primarily to establishing grammatical relationships: Prepositions, pronouns, conjugations and determiners.

• Closed word classes

• Words occur in narrow range of possible positions, there is no flexibility in word order.

• Words change very little over longs periods of time.

• Establish logical relationships between the diferent part of sentences. 

• Words are fixed and invariant.

• New words enter the language constantly.  Example: Emoticons= Emotion + Icon ​​​​

• The smallest unit of meaning. A morpheme can be a single word or other independly meaningful units.

• For example: The word "book" cannot be broken into any other units, it is a single morpheme 

• There are two kinds of morphemes: Bound & free.

• Bound 

• Free

• They are meaningful units that can stand alone, example: Blizzard, Never, Amaze or Grace.

• Need to be attached or bound to other meaningful units, example: Undeniable = Un+deny+able

• Morphology

• Inflexional Morphemes

• Derivational Morphemes

• Are lexical morphemes. They somehow either change the class a word belongs to or change the semantic meaning of a word.

• Are grammatical morphemes. Don't change the class to which a word belongs nor its semantic meaning.