Why every English speaker should know the basics of morphology
In a language with hundreds of thousands of words, seeing how words hint at their own meaning is imperative.
The other day I read the word convivial, and I didn’t recognize it. But I soon realized that I recognized its parts. Con- means together in Latin, and I recognized vivir (to live) from Spanish.
“The word must mean living together or side-by-side,” I concluded. And when I looked up the word, I realized I was almost right. Historically, it did mean to live together. But over time, it started to refer more to the joyous feelings that come from having the right atmosphere in a group.
Did I fully know the meaning before looking it up? No. But I was able to do a mental game in my head which will help me remember the word and its meaning.
That mental game is called morphological awareness: being aware of all the small meaningful units in a word and using them to gauge the meaning of the overall word.
This week, we’re tackling morphology. We’re going to go over the basics of this major branch of linguistics and learn how to apply morphology to vocabulary building.
What is Morphology?
The word morphology has two parts: 1) morph- which relates to morphemes* and 2) -ology which relates to the study of something. So, we know that it’s the study of morphemes, but what exactly are morphemes?
The simple definition that I keep in my lexicon is that a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning.
It’s easiest to understand through an example:
kitten: one morpheme
kittens: two morphemes
By adding -s to the end of kitten, we’re changing the meaning of the word. It’s no longer a single kitten. Now we know that there are multiple kittens. Thus, plural -s carries meaning; it’s a morpheme.
Sometimes morphemes are full-on words that can stand on their own, like kitten. These are called free morphemes: they’re free to be their own words. But bound morphemes don’t share the same freedom, they need to be bound to a free morpheme.
In our kitten example, kitten is a free morpheme, but -s is a bound one.
Not all morphemes are the same
Morphemes can tell us about the grammatical relationship between words, like we saw with kittens. In English, we only have eight of these inflectional morphemes (which is really few compared to other languages):
The main thing to know about inflectional morphemes is that they never change the part of speech, nor do they create new words. They rather just tells us some grammatical information. They’re a closed class which means that it’s incredibly rare that a language like English would add another inflectional morpheme.
The other group of morphemes is called derivational. Derivational morphemes are super interesting (and fun!) because they’re integral to word formation. Each time a derivational morpheme is added, a new word is derived. These morphemes may change the part of speech of a word (but don’t always).
In a word like transportation, we have several derivational morphemes:
trans: across
port: to carry
-tion: noun
Recognizing these derivational morphemes in words gives you great hints at what the words mean. And even better, if someone tells you a new word, you have a better chance of understanding them. For example, if I show you a video that I’m going to TikTokize, you’ll understand what I mean by TikTokize…even if you’ve never heard that word before!
Phonology & morphology crossover
A final important thing to keep in mind is that morphemes might look different depending on its neighboring sound. Guess which morpheme all these words have in common (think about the meaning that they all share):
improbable
imbalance
irreplaceable
illicit
incarcerated
inalienable
They all share the meaning not, improbable means not probable, irreplaceable means not replaceable.
So, is the morpheme im-, ir-, il-, or in-?
There’s a pattern going on with the sounds.
/m/ is a bilabial sound, so is /p/
/r/ is the same sound as /r/
/l/ is the same sound as /l/
They all match. Whereas, in- seems to go before any other sound. We can conclude that in- is the underlying form of all of them. In- just changes before a bilabial, /r/, and /l/. And this makes sense. Try to say “inreplaceable.” It’s a lot of extra tongue work.
The main takeaway is that morphemes can be chameleons known as allomorphs that change their shade depending on their environment.
How to build morphological awareness
Morphological awareness, or being aware of the different meaningful units of a word takes time. The good news is that building this habit engages your curiosity and helps you make connections between all the languages you know.
This is what I do:
When I find a word I don’t know, I pause and think of any connections I can make.
For example, circumspect.
I know:
circumference (relates to circles)
circumvent (relates to moving around)
spectacle (relates to seeing)
spectator (relates to seeing)
So, I think to myself: circumspect must mean to look around. And then I look up the word and check my work.
It looks like I got the origin correct. And it seems like over time this word started to mean someone who is always looking around and is always wary.
This mental game helps me make connections and learn roots and morphemes little by little.
The shortcoming of morphological awareness
There are plenty of words in English that don’t hint at their own meaning. Morphology can’t really help us there.
There are also words like convivial and circumspect that don’t exactly mean what their morphemes hint at.
There are also examples of morphemes that have multiple meanings. In- in Latin meant in and not.
These arguments are all true, but it’s also true that over 60% of English words have Latin or Greek roots (that number doesn’t even include all of the morphemes). And it’s also true that teaching morphological awareness has led to strides in reading and orthography, especially for young children.
For English learners, it also allows an opportunity to make connections between all the languages they know.
Discussion
Morphology is an incredibly applicable branch of linguistics. I hope this newsletter inspires you to be curious about how morphemes come together to sprinkle our words with meaning.
To end this newsletter, here’s a practice activity. You can comment below (paid subscribers) or reply to this email (anyone) with your answers.
How many morphemes are in the following words? What does each morpheme mean? Bonus points: is it inflectional or derivational?
manuscripts
parenthetical
bookcases
morphologist
Works Cited
Fasold, R. W., & Connor-Linton, J. (Eds.). (2014). An introduction to language and linguistics. Cambridge university press.
Hi Monica, new subscriber here 👋 Absolutely loved this topic and article. Can't wait to delve further and also into your pronunciation articles. So interesting and useful for me as a teacher and learner.