Morphology

March 15, 2017John

What with one thing and another, theres a lot of pressure on teachers today.
Grammar and word study has suddenly assumed much greater proportions and one aspect
of grammar somebody was asking me about the other day was morphology.

The conversation went like this:

Teacher: Ive got to teach my class about morphology.
Me: Okay. Whats the problem with morphology?
Teacher: Nobody ever told me anything about it on my teacher training course.

This post is an attempt at an explanation.

More broadly speaking morphology is the study of form or structure. In linguistics,

morphology is the study of words, of how they are formed and of what their
relationship is to other words in the language. English is both synthetic or
inflectional and agglutinative or affixing. Both of which can be subsumed under the
heading fusional. Inflectional languages, such as Latin, add suffixes to indicate
tense in verb forms and whether nouns are the subject or object in a sentence. In
agglutinative languages, words contain spaces into which small, verbal elements can
be placed. For example, in the word unusually, un- expresses the meaning not,
and -ly shows that the word is an adverb.

Firstly, a morpheme is the smallest unit of sound that signifies meaning. Youd
probably think that the smallest unit of meaning would be the word but this gives
rise to a number of problems. For example, the words swim and swims are
different, even though the words are clearly related and also follow a similar
pattern to many other verbs in English. In English, we might say I swim every
morning, but Emma swims every morning. In the first example, the word swim is
what is called a free morpheme; in the second, the -s attached to swim is a bound
morpheme.

Free and bound morphemes are mutually exclusive. Swim is a free morpheme and can
stand or occur alone; bound morphemes, like the -s, on the other hand, are not
free-standing and need to be bound or linked to other morphemes. The convention
is to indicate this by using a hyphen to follow a morpheme that precedes another
morpheme, such as in the word unhappy, in which the bound morpheme, a prefix, would
be indicated un- (happy). Similarly, when a bound morpheme follows another
morpheme, this is shown by a hyphen which precedes the bound morpheme, such as we
see in the case of (swim) -s.

In English, words can be formed by combining morphemes to create new words. Here
are some examples:

Compound words, such as stairlift and graveyard, combine two free morphemes.
Lightly is a combination of light and ly, a free and a bound morpheme.
The example conjoin puts together the bound morpheme con with the free morpheme
join.
We can further distinguish between the two types of bound morpheme: inflectional
and derivational.

Regular English verbs, such as film and limp, are free morphemes which provide a
base for inflections which change their meaning. Thus, we have films, filming and
filmed, and limps, limping and limped. Similarly, nouns can be inflected to
resonate a change in number and gender. [In languages, such as Spanish and Italian,
pronouns and adjectives also inflect to indicate a change in number and gender.]
So, an inflectional morpheme can change a verbs tense, aspect, mood, person and
number. However, inflections dont change the basic meaning of the word.
Derivational morphemes, such as un- and -er, alter significantly the meaning of
base forms inasmuch as they form different words. For example, the meaning of
unimportant is the converse of important. Similarly, the addition of -er
changes not only the meaning of a word but often the word class: for example, the
verb help becomes a noun helper when the suffix -er is added.

I would expect anyone teaching phonics to begin introducing the idea of morphemes
in the concrete context of teaching reading writing. At a fairly simple level, this
is easy to do as, in the words of David Crystal, most children give the impression
of having assimilated of at least three quarters all the grammar there is to learn
by the age of between four and five years. There is then a point at which the
teaching of morphology can run in parallel to phonics teaching but it doesnt
precede phonics teaching and in fact, because of the complexity of conceptual
understanding and the amount of code knowledge required to be learned, morphology
shouldnt be taught in tandem with phonics teaching when children are in the early
stages of beginning to read.

When older children who have fallen behind and are being taught as an intervention,
it goes without saying that bringing together phonics teaching with meaning,
etymology, morphemic analysis, and so on, is likely to enhance interest while
deepening knowledge. Its what phonics teachers worth their salt have always done.