Morphology
Morphology is the study of morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of linguistic meaning. It cannot be further analyzed. Unit is a single morpheme because you cannot break it down into different parts. However, morphology is made up of two morphemes: morph-, meaning “form” or “shape” and -ology, meaning “the study of.” There are two types of morphemes: bound morphemes and free morphemes. Free morphemes, like the word free itself, can stand on their own as words. But bound morphemes, like -ology, must be attached to a word to be used in regular speech. Morphology studies the the meanings of these linguistic elements and how they combine to form new meanings.
We can divide bound morphemes further into two types: derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes. Derivational morphemes can change the category of the word. Derivation is a noun, derivation + al, derivational, is an adjective. They also might change the meaning of the word, like un + derivational (if that’s a word). un- negates the word, makes it “not derivational.” Basically, a derivational morpheme is a morpheme that changes a word’s meaning or category.
Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that do not change the meaning or category of the word. They usually perform grammatical functions, like making plurals. Inflection is a noun, inflection + s is still a noun and still means the same thing, but I’m indicating that it’s more than one. I inflect, she inflects, they inflected, all refer to the same action, but the ending -s indicates third person, and -ed indicates that the action took place in the past.
Bound morphemes also fit into categories of things called affixes, like suffixes and prefixes, which we all are familiar with. However, there are two other types of affixes called infixes and circumfixes, neither of which are found in English. Infixes are affixes that are placed in the middle of a word. In the Philippine language Bontoc, fikas means "strong," while fumikas means"to be strong." In English, the only plausible example of an infix is in something like un-f----ing-believable. But whether that can be considered an infix or not is up for debate.
Circumfixes are affixes that surround a word. German Ich lese means "I read," but Ich habe gelesen means "I have read." ge- -en is a circumfix that makes a past participle.
We can divide bound morphemes further into two types: derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes. Derivational morphemes can change the category of the word. Derivation is a noun, derivation + al, derivational, is an adjective. They also might change the meaning of the word, like un + derivational (if that’s a word). un- negates the word, makes it “not derivational.” Basically, a derivational morpheme is a morpheme that changes a word’s meaning or category.
Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that do not change the meaning or category of the word. They usually perform grammatical functions, like making plurals. Inflection is a noun, inflection + s is still a noun and still means the same thing, but I’m indicating that it’s more than one. I inflect, she inflects, they inflected, all refer to the same action, but the ending -s indicates third person, and -ed indicates that the action took place in the past.
Bound morphemes also fit into categories of things called affixes, like suffixes and prefixes, which we all are familiar with. However, there are two other types of affixes called infixes and circumfixes, neither of which are found in English. Infixes are affixes that are placed in the middle of a word. In the Philippine language Bontoc, fikas means "strong," while fumikas means"to be strong." In English, the only plausible example of an infix is in something like un-f----ing-believable. But whether that can be considered an infix or not is up for debate.
Circumfixes are affixes that surround a word. German Ich lese means "I read," but Ich habe gelesen means "I have read." ge- -en is a circumfix that makes a past participle.
Roots and Stems
Another important part of morphology is the concept of roots and stems. A root is a linguistic unit that cannot be broken down into further parts. This sounds similar to the definition of morpheme I gave earlier, but there’s an important distinction between them. A morpheme can either attach to things or it can have things attached to it, but a root is always a base part that morphemes are attached to. Take a root like order. I start with order, then orderly, orderliness, disorderliness. After adding -ly to order, it becomes a stem rather than a root, because now I can break it down into individual parts. A stem is a linguistic unit that can be broken down, but can have things attached to it. Orderly and orderliness are stems, but disorderliness can’t be described as anything other than a word, because no elements can attach to it. It is “complete,” if you will. Orderly is still a word, though, it’s just also a stem. These categories might be confusing because they’re like squares and rectangles. A word can be a stem, but a stem isn’t necessarily a word. The same goes for roots and morphemes. -mit is a root. It cannot be analyzed further and it can only have elements attached to it: permit, commit, submit. However, in this case, not only is -mit a bound morpheme, but unlike other bound morphemes like dis-, it has no meaning on its own. It does have its own meaning in French. They have permettre, commettre, soumettre but also simply mettre, which means “to put.” I defined morpheme as “the smallest unit of linguistic meaning,” but sometimes this definition is too simple. -mit means nothing on its own, but if when taken away, the words that use them lose their meaning. Com- or con- means “with,” but commit means “dedicate, resolve.” On top of that, they don’t seem to have consistent meaning. Permit means “allow,” and submit means “yield” or “send for evaluation.” A word tends to be greater than the sum of its morphemes, which is why meaningless elements can give meaning to other things.
The root -mit is an example of an unproductive morpheme. Productive morphemes can be applied to many different words. -ness is a productive way to form a noun from an adjective: coolness, darkness, sharpness. If one were to form a new noun from an existing adjective, one might say of a blue wall: “this wall is full of blueness.” But other endings, like -th, also seem to form nouns, like youth from young. And we would construct truth from true, but never bluth from blue. -th is an unproductive morpheme.
The root -mit is an example of an unproductive morpheme. Productive morphemes can be applied to many different words. -ness is a productive way to form a noun from an adjective: coolness, darkness, sharpness. If one were to form a new noun from an existing adjective, one might say of a blue wall: “this wall is full of blueness.” But other endings, like -th, also seem to form nouns, like youth from young. And we would construct truth from true, but never bluth from blue. -th is an unproductive morpheme.
English Morphological History
In his book What Language Is, John McWhorter explains how -th used to be very productive, but all the words using it are very old and it’s lost its productivity. Lots of productive, bound, derivational morphemes in English, like pre-, post-, anti-, dis-, are derived from Latin or Greek. A Cambridge History of the English Language describes how it wasn’t always this way. An 11th-century English abbot named Ælfric of Eynsham wrote a book called Grammar. In the book, he had to describe certain things that were only described by Latin technical terms. In Modern English, we take these terms more or less directly from Latin: preposition, conjunction, and so on. However, Ælfric took a different approach. He took individual morphemes and translated them.
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Ælfric of Eynsham
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When Ælfric encountered a new term like preposition, he would take pre- and translate it to the Old English prefix for-, which means “before” (as in foresee). He took -posit- and made it into -set- and then took the noun-forming suffix -tion and turned it to -nys, which is roughly equivalent to -ness today. Put it together in Old English and it yields forsetnys, which rolled off the tongue quite nicely for them. But put it together in Modern English without Latin and it yields “before-set-ness,” which doesn’t sound quite right. What's interesting, though, is that having more productive native morphemes changes the etymological landscape of the language. When one has a lot more useful morphemes, one can combine them in many different ways to convey many concepts. Ælfric took advantage of this attribute to describe foreign concepts while staying in his own language. However, this has its drawbacks. For example, he translated participle to dælnimend, which literally means “something which takes part in.” Looking at participle itself, it’s clear why it was translated that way, but dælnimend’s individual morphemes have nothing to do with the meaning of the word as a whole. This causes the word itself to become alienated from its parts. In other words, it becomes a single morpheme. The word forget is an example of this. In addition to meaning "before," for- also meant ‘away from.’ So forget literally means “get away from, leave behind.” We see how the sense of not remembering relates to that, but that’s not really at the forefront of our minds when we think about forgetting. As a result, we forget about the word’s metaphorical content, and so we forget the individual morphemes that create that content. So now forget is a single morpheme. It would be silly to analyze forgettable as for + get + able. It should be forget + able, because analyzing forget further yields nothing of real meaning or value.