By desmond bett; B. A- criminology m. A – public administration & policy

Chapter 3
Close encounters of a morphemic kind


3.1
THE QUEST FOR VERBAL ATOMS
We saw in the last chapter that the word is the smallest meaningful unit of language that can function independently in the grammar. A word can be used on its own, without appending it to some other unit. Thus, in the word childish we can isolate child and use it on its own because it is a word in its own right. But we cannot use –ish as a stand-alone unit, for –ish is not a word.
While recognizing that words are the smallest meaningful units which functions independently in the grammar, we also need to recognize that words can be decomposed into smaller units that are also meaningful. Our task in this chapter is to explore the internal structure of words in order to gain some understanding of the basic units which are used to form words.

3.2
CLOSE MORPHOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS: ZOOMING IN ON MORPHEMES
Originally ‘morphology’ means the study of biological forms. But nineteenth-century students of language borrowed the term and applied it to the study of word-structure. In linguistics MORPHOLOGY is the study of the formation and internal organization of words.
Let us begin our morphological analysis by considering half a dozen words (not altogether randomly chosen):
[3.1]
hope soon mend boil safe leaf word elephant
Obviously all the words in [3.1] have a meaning, but lack internal structure. We cannot identify any smaller units that are themselves meaningful which occur inside them. If a Martian stopped you in a street near a local zoo and enquired what plant in elephant or ho in hope means, you would think she was asking a more bizarre question that did not merit any answer. Or you might condescendingly explain that, of course, in each case the whole word means something, but its parts cannot be said to mean anything on their own. Though somewhat puzzled, the Martian might accept your explanation.
But, being the persistent type, let us suppose she enquired further whether the words in [3.2] were also indivisible into smaller meaningful units:
[3.2]
childish hopeless sooner mended elephants re-boil un-safe ex-wife
You would have to give a different answer. You would need to tell your interrogator, who by now would be getting increasingly bewildered, that the words in [3.2] can be divided into smaller units of meaning as shown in [3.3]:
[3.3]
child-ish hope-less soon-er mend-ed elephant-s re-boil un-safe ex-wife
The part of the word that is not italicized can function as an independent word in the grammar. Indeed, each of the nonitalicised chunks is a word (i.e. vocabulary item) that is listed as such in the dictionary. By contrast the italicized bits, though meaningful (and their meanings can be indicated as shown in [3.4]).
[3.4]
-ish ‘having the (objectionable) qualities child-ish= ‘having the qualities of a child’
-less ‘without X’ hopeless= ‘without hope’
-er ‘more X’ sooner= ‘more soon’
-ed ‘past’ mended= ‘mend in the past’
-s ‘plural’ elephants= ‘more than one elephant’
Re ‘again’ re-boil= ‘boil again’
un ‘not X’ unsafe= ‘not safe’
ex ‘former’ ex-wife= ‘former wife’

What we have done to the words in [3.4] can be done to thousands of other words in English. They can be decomposed into smaller units of meaning (e.g. re-‘again’) or grammatical function (e.g. –ed ‘past’).

The term MORPHEME is used to refer to the smallest unit that has meaning or serve a grammatical function in a language. Morphemes are the atoms with which words are built. It is not possible to find sub-morphemic units that are themselves meaningful or have a grammatical function. Thus, given –less or un-, it would make no sense to try assign some identifiable meaning to any part of these forms. Of course, it is possible to isolate the individual sounds /I-I-s/ or / -n/. but those sounds in themselves do not mean anything.
We have now established that words are made up of morphemes. But how do we recognize a morpheme when we see one? Our definition of the morpheme as the smallest unit of meaning (or grammatical function) will be the guiding principle. Any chunk of a word with a particular meaning will be said to represent a morpheme. That is how we proceeded in [3.3] and [3.4] above.
Morphemes tend to have a fairly stable meaning which they bring to any word in which they appear. If we take re- and un-, for example, they mean ‘again’ and ‘not‘respectively-not just in the words we have listed above, but also in thousands of other words. Usually morphemes are used again and again to form different words. Thus re- meaning ‘re-do whatever the verb means’ can be attached before most verbs to yield a new word with a predictable meaning (e.g. re-run, re-take, re-build etc.). in like manner, un- meaning ‘not X’ (where X stands for whatever the adjective means) can be attached to various adjectives ( e.g. un-real, un-clean, un-happy etc.) to yield a new word with a predictable meaning.
The segmentation of words into morphemes is not an arcane pastime indulge in by linguistics to while away the time on wet Bank Holiday afternoon. It is something that is important for all users of language. During your life time, you will probably encounter hundreds of thousands of different words. Many of these words will be new to you. For no matter how extensive you vocabulary is, you will inevitably come across words that are unfamiliar. It is impossible for anyone to know all the words that are found in English.
So, what you do when faced with unfamiliar word? Reach for a good dictionary? Perhaps. But this is not always feasible. Nor it is always necessary. Very often you just figure out what the strange word means using the context, together with your knowledge of the meaning of morphemes which the word contains. You normally do this subconsciously. What we are doing here is making explicit your tacit knowledge of word-structure.
Imagine the scenario. In 1992, a newspaper report on the war in the Bosnia republic states that what we are witnessing is the lebanonisation of Bosnia. Suppose you have not encountered the word lebanonisation before. Would you understand what the writer is saying? Probably you would-without looking up in any dictionary. How would you do it? The answer is simple. By using your knowledge of the world-in particular history (balkanisation) –and your knowledge in current affairs (the civil war in Lebanon) plus your knowledge of the principles of word-formation you are able to work out the meaning of Lebanonisation.
Let us focus on the principles of word-formation. You know that –ize/-ise is used when talking about nations to mean ‘to make X’, e.g. from America we get Americanise, from Korea we get Koreanise, from Kenya we get Kenyanise etc. by attaching –(an)ise we turn a noun into a verb. So, give the noun Lebanon we can form the verb lebanonise. Next, from the verb Lebanonise, we can create a new noun by adding –action (which forms noun of action).
If you know that various warlords created warring fiefdoms that destroyed the Lebanese state during the civil war that raged in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, you will know that the Croats, Muslims and Serbs engaged in the Bosnian conflict risk doing the same to the Bosnia state in the 1990s. lebanonisation is the act of ‘turning a country into another Lebanon’. Thus, our knowledge of word of structure contributes to our understanding of the meaning of unfamiliar words.
We have demonstrated that words can be decomposed into morphemes. Now we are going to see that words have INTERNAL STRUCTURE. A simple way of showing this is to analyze words like uncanny and unhappy. From these words we can derive uncannier and unhappier. If you analyze unhappier, you will see that extracting the correct meaning ‘more [not happy]’ (i.e. sadder) rather than the incorrect one ‘not [more happy]’ (i.e. not happier) depends on the way we group together the morphemes. In the first analysis where unhappier is interpreted as sadder, the meaning ‘not’ conveyed by un- is bracketed together with happy [unhappy] as one unit and this is intensified by the -er suffix. In the alternative second analysis, happy and –er are bracketed together as a unit [happier] i.e. more happy) which then is negated by [un-] to give ‘not more happy’, which is incorrect. When someone is unhappier, it does not mean they are simply less happy, it means rather they are not happy at all. They are sad. This shows that morphemes is a word with several morphemes may be grouped together in different ways for semantic purposes. The way in which this is done has semantic consequences. Conceivably, morphemes could be thrown together higgledy-piggledy to form a word. So long as you had the right morphemes, a well-formed word would pop out. But that is definitely not the case. Words have internal structural groupings, as we have seen.
Furthermore, the sequencing of morphemes in a word may be subject to restrictions. Take a word like ungovernability which contains four morphemes, namely un-, govern, abil, ity. Everyone who knows this word knows that these four morphemes must appear in the order in [3.5a]. Any other order is strictly forbidden.
[3.5a]
a. un-govern-abil-ity