III. MORPHOLOGY 3.1 Morphology and Morphemes Morphology is the study of morphemes and their arrangements in forming words (Nida, 1962:1). A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful units which may constitute words or parts of words. This field covers the morphological process, morphophonemics, and parts of speech. The morphological process can be affixation, reduplication, or compound. Parts of speech consist of noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pre/postposition, conjunction, pronoun, article, interjection, and numeral. Division of Morpheme A morpheme can be a free morpheme or a bound morpheme. A free morpheme is a morpheme which can stand by itself. It is already a word. The forms such as big, he, you, can, come, cat, etc. are all free morphemes. A bound morpheme is a morpheme that must be attached to another morpheme. It is not yet a word, it is only a part of word. It cannot stand by itself. The forms such as ly, ity, ed, ion, etc. are all bound morphemes. A word may consists of a root and an affix. In general roots are single morphemes which carry the basic meaning of the words; a root is the core of a word. Roots may be either bound forms or free forms. A root is sometimes also a stem, they are different in that a stem can be more than a single morpheme while the root is always a single morpheme. The nuclei of a morphological construction consists of (1) a root or (2) a combination of roots. In the construction 'boyishness' the element 'boy' is the nucleus and ' ishness' constitutes the non-nucleus. In 'breakwater' the nucleus 'breakwater' consists of two roots (Nida, 1962:83). Morphemes can also be divided into segmental and supra-segmental morphemes. Segmental morphemes are those that occur only as part or all of some word, supra-segmental ones are those that are not part of a word (Hockett, 1958:168). An intonation for instance can change the meaning if the intonation changes from falling to rising (question). The stress also can change the meaning if it is moved such as in 'walking stick'. Another term for supra-segmental is supra-fix. Principles of identification of morphemes 1. Forms which are identical and have the same meaning belong to the same morpheme. teacher helper singer er in the three words above belong to one morpheme to mark the doer of the action. 2. Forms which are similar and have the same meaning belong to the same morpheme if the difference is phonologically conditioned. books [bUks] churches [c?cIz] babies [beibiz] s, es, es in the three words belong to one morpheme to indicate plural. z occurs when the final sound is voiced iz occurs when the final sound is hissing s occurs elsewhere { s}( z ~ iz ~ s) 3. Forms which are different and have the same meaning belong to the same morpheme if the difference is morphologically conditioned. books children s, ren belong to the same morpheme to indicate plural, the form ren occurs only certain words: child, ox. { s}( z ~ iz ~ s) ~ en 4. The change of meaning without any addition of form in parallel with another form is called a zero morpheme. The plural form of sheep is sheep. The form of sheep as plural form is called zero morpheme. 5. The units that are phonologically and semantically the same belong to one morpheme, but those that are phonologically the same and semantically different are not the same morpheme. They are homophonous or homophones, such as pair, pare, pear. The er in singer is a different morpheme from the er in taller, because they have different meaning. 6. Any isolatable unit is a morpheme. The word thankfulness has three morphemes; ness can be isolated from the word, ful also can be isolated from thankful. Allomorph Allomorph is the variation of a morpheme. The plural form of English is the morpheme { s}. This morpheme has three variations, i.e. s, iz, and z. The distributions of the variations are as follows: z occurs after voiced phonemes s occurs after voiceless consonants iz occurs after hissing phonemes In Indonesian the prefix {meN} also has some allomorphs, such as m?? , m?� , m? , m?n , m?m . 3.2 Morphological Process The formation of word is called also morphological process. Word can be formed by: 1. Affixation: prefix, infix, suffix, confix, suprafix 2. Reduplication: complete, partial, sound change, affixed. 3. Compounding: endocentric, and exocentric 4. Acronymy, clipping, blending, vowel change, suplition, and zero morpheme. |