MORPHEMES

A morpheme may consist of a word, such as hand, or a meaningful piece of a word, such as the -ed of looked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Some morphemes have no concrete form or no continuous form, as we will see, and some do not have meanings in the conventional sense of the term.

You may also run across the term morph. The term ‘morph’ is sometimes used to refer specifically to the phonological realization of a morpheme. For example, the English past tense morpheme that we spell -ed has various morphs. It is realized as [t] after the voiceless [p] of jump (cf. jumped), as [d] after the voiced [l] of repel (cf. repelled), and as [d] after the voiceless [t] of root or the voiced [d] of wed (cf. rooted and wedded).  

 We can also call these morphs allomorphs or variants. The appearance of one morph over another in this case is determined by voicing and the place of articulation of the final consonant of the verb stem. It is important to take very seriously the idea that the grammatical function of a morpheme, which may include its meaning, must be constant.

Consider the English words lovely and quickly. They both end with the suffix -ly. But is it the same in both words? No – when we add -ly to the adjective quick, we create an adverb that describes how fast someone does something. But when we add -ly to the noun love, we create an adjective. What on the surface appears to be a single morpheme turns out to be two. One attaches to adjectives and creates adverbs; the other attaches to nouns and creates adjectives.

There are two other sorts of affixes that you will encounter, infixes and circumfixes. Both are classic challenges to the notion of morpheme. Infixes are segmental strings that do not attach to the front or back of a word, but rather somewhere in the middle. 

The Tagalog infix -um- is illustrated below (McCarthy and Prince 1993: 101–5; French 1988). It creates an agent from a verb stem and appears before the first vowel of the word:

(1) Root -um-

/sulat/ /s-um-ulat/ ‘one who wrote’

/gradwet/ /gr-um-adwet/ ‘one who graduated’

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631203184%5CAronoff_sample%20chapter_What%20is%20morphology.pdf