Chapter 3

Close Encounters of a Morphemic Kind

3.1
THE QUESTION FOR VERBAL ATOMS
We saw in the last chapter that the word is the smallest meaningful unit of
language that can function independently in the grammar. A word can be used on its own,
without appending it to some other unit. Thus, in the word childish we can isolate child
and use it on its own because it is a word in its own right. But we cannot use -ish as a
stand-alone unit, for -ish is not a word.
While recognizing that words are the smallest meaningful units which function
independently in the grammar, we also need to recognize that words can be decomposed
into smaller units that are also meaningful. I ask in this chapter is to explore the internal
structure of words in order to gain some understanding of the basic units which are used
to form words.
3.2
CLOSE MORPHOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS: ZOOMING IN ON
MORPHEMES
Originally 'morphology' meant the study of biological forms. But ninetieth
centuries students of language borrow the term and applied it to the study of word-
structure. In linguistics MORPHOLOGY is the study of the formation internal
organisation of words.
Let us begin our morphological analysis by considering half a thousand words (not
altogether randomly chosen):

[3.1]
Hope soon mend boil safe leaf word elephant
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 Obviously, all the words in [3.1] have a meaning, but lack internal structure. We
cannot identify any smaller units that are themselves meaningful which occur inside
them. If a Martian stop you in a street near the local zoom and inquired what phant in
elephant or ho in hope means, you think she was asking a most bizarre question that did
not merit an answer. Are you my condescendingly explain that, of course, finish case the
whole word means something, but its parts cannot be said to mean anything on their own.
Though somewhat puzzled, the Martian might accept your explanation.
But, being the persistent type, let us suppose she enquire further whether the word
in [3.2] were also indivisible into smaller meaningful units.

[3.2]
Childish hopeless sooner mended elephants re-boil unsafe ex-wife
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You would have to give different answer. You would need to tell your interrogator,
who by now would be getting increasingly bewildered, that the words in [3.2] can be
divided into smaller units of meaning as shown in [3.3]

[3.3]
-ish ‘having the (objectionable) qualities Child-ish= ‘having the qualities of a
of child
-less ‘without X’ Hopeless = ‘without hope
-er ‘more X’ Sooner= ‘more soon’
-ed ‘past’ Mended= ‘mend in the past’
-s ‘plural’ Elephants= ‘more than one elephant’
re ‘again’ Re-boil= ‘boil again’
un ‘not X’ Unsafe= ‘not safe’
ex ‘former’ Ex-wife= ‘former wife’
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What we have done to the words in [3.4] can be done to thousands of other words
in English. They can be decomposed into smaller units of meaning (e.g. re- 'again)
grammatical function (e.g. -ed 'past').
 The term MORPHEME is used to refer to the smallest unit that has meaning or
serves as a grammatical function in a language. Morphemes are the atoms with which
words are built. It is not possible to find sub-morphemic units that are themselves
meaningful or have a grammatical function. Thus, given -less or un-, it would make no
sense to try to assign more identifiable meaning to any part of this forms. Of course, it is
possible to isolate the individual sounds /l-l-s/ or / -n/, but those sounds in themselves do
not mean anything.
We have now established that words are made up of morphemes. But how do we
recognise a morpheme when we see one? Our definition of the morpheme as the smallest
unit of meaning (or grammatical function) will be the guiding principle. Any chunk of a
word with a particular meaning will be said to represent a morpheme. That is how we
proceeded in [3.3] and [3.4] above.
Morphemes tend to have a fairly stable meaning which they bring to any word in
which they appear. If we take care re- and un- , for example, they mean ‘again’ and ‘not’
respectively––not just in the words we have listed above, but also in thousands of other
words. Usually, morphemes are used again and again to form different words. Thus, re-
meaning ‘re-do whatever the verb means’ can be attached before the most verbs to yield a
new word with a predictable meaning (e.g. re-run, re-take, re-build etc.). In like manner,
un- meaning ‘not X’ (where X stand for whatever the adjective means) can be attached to
the various adjectives (e.g. un-real, un-clean, un-happy etc.) to yield a new word with a
predictable negative meaning.