Morphological analysis involves decomposing words into their smallest meaningful units called morphs, which are categorized as either free morphs (able to stand alone, such as 'class' or 'walk') or bound morphs (requiring attachment to other elements, such as the third-person singular present tense markers -s, -z, and -ed). In English, variable words like 'walks' can be analyzed into morphs that show complementary distribution, where different bound morphs appear in specific phonetic environments (e.g., -s after voiceless consonants, -z after voiced consonants). This analytical approach allows linguists to identify morphemes—abstract families of morphs sharing the same grammatical function—with the head term representing the default form and members showing variant realizations.
Morphological Analysis: Words Into Morphemes & Allomorphs
Added:this unit discusses the main principles and methods of analyzing words into their component parts focus of our analysis will be present day English but as you will see towards the end I will use an example from another language what we will proceed as follows we will first of all look at types of words then we will Define Define one particular type of word in more detail namely variable words and look at possible analyses of variable words and we will then perform what you call a morphological analysis so let's first of all look at types of words here you see a number of words all English words and they can be grouped into two types words that can modify their structure variable words and words that can cannot change at all the set of invariable words so obviously woman is a variable word you can have the genitive women's plural women sweet is another variable word because you can form the comparative or the superlative like sweeter or sweets myself a reflexive pronoun is certainly invariable because you cannot add anything you cannot reduce anything we could perhaps say okay it's already two items my and self but that's a different story walk is clearly variable it can be a noun or a verb you can have Walker Walkers you can have walks walked walking Etc the preposition about is clearly invariable and finally the two conjunctions coordinate conjunction but and if are also invariable we cannot do anything about these words there are some languages that have by and large well if not exclusively invariable words such languages are called isolating or analytic languages and typical examples are Chinese or Vietnamese so if you want to become a morphologist don't move to China there is hardly anything to do because all words or most words are invariable and they cannot be analyzed into further component parts but in English this is possible so let's now perform a morphological analysis of some selected words we know that we have to base our decisions on phology for various reasons many languages do not have writing systems at all many languages have writing systems that are not phonetic in character So-Cal phonographic writing systems in other words to generalize our decision and this is what linguistic is always about a generalization of facts rules across the languages of the world we have to base our decisions on phology so here you find walks misleads and classroom and our first task is to insert boundaries between those parts which we think can somehow be isolated so the boundary in morphology is this one this hashtag is used as a boundary between so-called moths so clearly here in Miss leads we have a boundary between Miss and leads we have a boundary which is clear between class and room in classroom but then also we would have a boundary here lead and leads are two different forms and so is walk and walks so these are our boundaries now what can we do with the results of our analysis we can first of all group them into two types of morphs we have so-called free morphs that is morphs or elements that can stand on their own they can occur without any additional uh components so clearly our free ms here are class then room then walk and finally uh whatever we' gotten lead now the result of morphological analysis are first of all morphs morphs are indicated by these curly brackets in linguistics so to be absolutely precise I have to put curly brackets around my three morphs so let's underline all three morphs here in green what are we going to do with the others well the others are not free anymore they are bound morphs they cannot stand on their own they have to be attached to other elements so we have a set called bound morphs and let's underline them in blue this is a bound morph this is a bound morph and here we have one so let's look at our bound mphs we have S and normally in order to indicate the position where do they occur you could occur you could introduce a hyphen this means it occurs after something then we have the Zed the Z which occurs after something and finally we have the miss that occurs before something else and again we're using curly brackets to indicate that these are morphs so this is the first step we analyze words into their component parts as a result we're getting morphs now let's take a closer look at um our bound morphs which occur in these examples so here we have let's first of all insert the morphing boundaries again the morph boundaries again so these are our boundaries here we have our free morphs and these are our bound morphes so here they are oops okay so let's analyze them in more detail and look what we can do with these three bound morphs they somehow denote the same thing namely the third person singular present tense if you attach these bound morphs to particular verbs the result is the verb is transformed into the third person sing the question is where do they occur in what sort of position well this one here the S and now I represented everything very precisely phonetically you could again add the position marker in front of it now this one occurs at a word boundary after a after a morph boundary where the final element that precedes has the feature minus voice so it must be voiceless so you have example like stop stops the p in stop is voiceless walk walks the C in walk is voiceless or hate hates so this is where this one occurs now this one occurs in positions where the final element whoops now Mis print where the final element before the morph boundary is Bo as in goes vows are voiced leads and so on well in this one here this is an interesting case the last one it occurs after sir Z SH and J if any of these occurs before the mouth boundary then this is too much here then we must insert is like in kisses buzzes uh matches and so on okay so we have three different contexts for our morphs in other words they occur in what we might want to call complementary distribution you know this concept from the phon well and these morphs they can now be grouped into a family the family has a head term unfortunately in morphology is also presented within curly brackets and it's called the morphine well and here we have the choice whatever we want to insert here is up to us we could do something like this so it's the third person singular present tense morphe which has the three members or it is simply the default which would be which occurs in most cases after all voiced um bound morphs which are verbs go lead Etc so we have several choices here so this is one analysis in English let's now look at a different language here we have Latin now in Latin we have inflectional so-call paradigms here we have the noun which denotes the word King and again we are we have to do it phonetically the analysis must be B based on phones rather than on the orthography so what can we do first of all let's insert the morph boundaries again so here it is quite clear we have rig REI reg reg by the way these uh this Paradigm denotes the nominative case the genitive case the dative case the accusative case and the instrumental these are cases now clearly we have the bound morph rig the free mo rig but what are we going to do with rigs now here we have a variant you see all our our bound morphs are relatively clear s is e m and a but here we have a different freeor RI what are we going to do with that well we do the same we did with the third person singular uh morphs in present day English we have two variants but now the two variants concerns the freeor what does it mean well it means king in both cases and all we need is now a definition of the context this one occurred in a very specific context namely it occurs whenever the following element is an S so other words here we have Rick here we have the boundary and here we have S added this is the particular context for Rick Rick becomes rig if an S follows well in this one occurs elsewhere in all other contexts we must be a little bit careful though we have just based our analysis of just one set of variants of one uh item namely rake rigs nevertheless we could group these two morphs these two free morphs into a family the morphine where we now would take the form that occurs as a default in most cases as well some people call it as the normalized as the generalized form and that's of course rig with a specific morph mentioned here well this is what we call morphological analysis we analyze data into their morphs and then we try to find out whether certain morphs belong to the C to the same morphine so the morphine is then the abstract head term the family members of the morphine are called morphs and just like with the phon if they belong to the same family we call them Alo mphs well that that's basically what we have to do in morphological analysis
Up Next
Morphology Explained: Morphemes in Linguistics
@crashcourse
686.3K views•2020-09-18
Conversation Analysis: Key Concepts & Research Domains in Linguistics
@pointstoponder5186
9K views•2020-12-30
Speech Acts Overview | Pragmatics & Language Use
@oer-vlc
213.8K views•2012-09-16
Accent Expert Explains U.S. Regional Dialects | Part 1
@WIRED
9.3M views•2021-01-21
Related Study Plans & Knowledge Roadmaps
Structured learning paths in Linguistics