Morphology Basics
What teachers need to know about
What is morphology? It is the shape of linguistic units
• ‘morphos’ from Ancient Greek means ‘shape’ or ‘change’
• ‘eme’ means the smallest element of something
A morpheme is the smallest
unit of language that has meaning
• A whole word: (chair, dragon, chocolate)
• A part of a word: (re, lect, est, er)
• A single phoneme: (s, or y)
• A word part that resembles a word: (able alone or -able in a word like comfortable)
A morpheme can be:
Morphological Awareness
Morphological awareness is the understanding that words are made up of meaningful units such as
• Prefixes,
• root words,
• and suffixes.
Morphological awareness complements and extends phonological awareness
Students learn that some syllables are
meaningful word parts
Students learn that common prefixes and
suffixes have meanings
Students are able to use morphemes to spell and
read words
Understandings for Teachers
Component skills of
morphological awareness are:
• Knowing the parts of words and how they make up the structure of longer words
• Using knowledge of morphemes to help with spelling
• Using morphology to inform understanding of base words and derived forms of words
Morphology is taught like phonemic awareness
Activities for teaching
morphological awareness:
• Segmenting words into morphemes
• Matching morphemes to their meanings
• Using morphemes to make words
Here’s Some Practice Segmenting Morphemes
projector
• pro ject or
• ahead throw thing that does
undivided
• un divide ed
• not separate past tense autobiography
• auto bio graph y
• self life written noun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_and_Latin_roots_in_English
More Practice Segmenting Morphemes
misplaced
• mis place ed
• wrong put past tense
lifesaver
• life save er
• living keep one that does
transaction
• trans act tion
• across do noun
http://www.cognatarium.com/cognatarium/
Free and Bound
Morphemes come in two types:
Free Morphemes
• salamander, boat, candle
● Can be used alone as words:
● Do not depend on any other word part to be words
● Can have one or more syllables
Types of Free Morphemes-Function words
Function words
• serve a grammatical function, but don’t have specific meanings on their own: for example…
Conjunctions
• words that compound subjects, predicates, series, and sentences
• or, and, but, so
Prepositions
• indicate place, time, or sequence
• of, in, after, to
Types of Free Morphemes-Function words
Pronouns
• refer to nouns and substitute for them
• he, she, them
Auxiliary verbs
• help main verbs to show tense, voice, or to express implicit meaning using syntax
• is, has, may have
Definite Articles
• are used with nouns to show degree of specificity of the reference
• the, an, a
Free morphemes can be:
• nouns – person, place, thing, or idea
• verbs – action or state of being
• adverbs – add description to verbs
• adjectives - add description to nouns
Content words – which are the most meaningful in the
sentence
• sailboat, armchair, input
Compound words – which are made of two free morphemes that keep
their meanings, it is how new words of Anglo-Saxon
origin are made
Highlight the base word (free morpheme) from which the longer word is constructed.
Activity: Identifying the free morpheme in words
Unhappy
Unhappy
Masterful
Masterful
Activity: Identify and highlight the free
morpheme in these words
Refill
Refill
Adventurous
Adventurous
Activity: Identify and highlight the free
morpheme in these words
Childhood
Childhood
Hopefulness
Hopefulness
Activity: Identify and highlight the free
morpheme in these words
Misunderstand
Misunderstand
Antidisestablishmentarianism
Antidisestablishmentarianism
Activity: Identify and highlight the free
morpheme in these words
Bound Morphemes
Must be combined with other morphemes to be a
word:
Are not a word by themselves
Can have one or more syllables
• e lect
dis rupt
tele graph
Types of Bound Morphemes
• pre ad mis
Prefixes-are added at the beginnings of words and add to or change the meaning of the base word or word root
• rupt ject tain
Word Roots- provide the main meaning of the word
• es ing tion
Suffixes- are added to the ends of words and can indicate number, tense, or part of speech
Identifying Morphemes
• You can start with the definition of the word part
• You can find another word where that word part is used
Identifying Morphemes can be tough
• Mistletoe, salamander
You need to think of the overall word and its meaning to decide if it has one or more than one morpheme
• It isn’t enough to find little words in the big ones: napkin is not a compound word
• A letter combination may be a morpheme in one word, but not in another: unhappy, under
Sometimes the clues can mislead you
• Power: -er is a suffix, but not in this word
• Mistletoe: mis- is a prefix, but not in this word
• Period: peri- is a prefix, but not in this word
• Comic: com- means with or together, but not in this word.
The structure of English words is
complex and meaning can
be variable for example:
Identify the number of syllables and then the number of morphemes in these words
serious
lastly
crept
sample
ser i ous 3 syllables serious 1 morpheme
last ly 2 syllables last ly 2 morphemes
crept 1 syllable crept 1 morpheme
sam ple 2 syllables sample 1 morpheme
Identify the number of syllables and then the number
of morphemes in these words
heighten
dangerous
mixed
colder
height en 2 syllables height en 2 morphemes
dan ger ous 3 danger ous 2
mixed 1 mix ed 2
cold er 2 cold er 2
Inflectional or Derivational
In English, the most powerful morphemes are the suffixes which can be:
Inflectional Suffixes: change the tense or number, but not the part of speech of the word
cat – cats talk - talked
Neutral derivational suffixes don’t change the
sound or accent of the word
quarter (n) –quarterly (adv)
plenty (n)-plentiful (adj)
Non-Neutral derivational suffixes can change the
vowel pattern of the word
When the accent pattern is changed, you can have an undifferentiated vowel
sound or schwa (ә)
in vite’– in vǝ ta’ tion
e volve’ – ev’ ǝ lu tion
Derivational Suffixes change the part of speech
of the word
Changes produced by derivational morphemes
These suffixes make nouns:
er, or, cian, ist
These are persons
sion , tion,
ment , ity
These are things
These make verbs:
ize, ify
This one makes
adverbs:
ly
These make
adjectives:
ar, ous, ive, al, ful
Identify the Inflectional or Derivational Suffixes
-s, -es
-ful
-er, -est
-ed
-tion
inflectional –changes number
derivational- adjective or adverb
inflectional—comparative adjective derivational—verb to noun sing/singer
inflectional—changes tense
derivational- makes nouns
Identify the part of speech of each word in these pairs.
move verb movement noun
nature noun natural adjective
ignite verb ignition noun
liquid noun liquify verb
comment verb commentator noun
Rule: The inflectional suffix is added on after the derivational suffix when making a word with a derivational ending plural, past, comparative, or possessive
fun – funny – funniest
ring – ringer- ringers
name – nameless – namelessness
What do we teach and when? Morphology by grade level:
1st & 2nd Grade
3rd to 6th Grades
Middle School and High School
K-12
• As you teach suffixes, teach their meanings
• Teach that longer words are made of parts
• Teach the most common prefixes, roots, and suffixes
• Teach those morphemes essential for reading in your content area
• Teach about the language of your subject when teaching meanings of key terms
A Resource for Teaching Morphology
Here is a website that has morphology lesson plans and activities.
http://www.freereading.net/index.php?title=Prefixes_and_Suffixes_Activities
Mini Lesson for Prefix pre-
pre- Words
prepay preview
pretest prejudge
preheat preteen
pre
pre
test pretest
view preview
pre
pre
pay prepay
judge prejudge
pre
pre
heat preheat
teen preteen
How does morphemic awareness help our students?
• Understanding morphology develops language skills through:
Decoding
Vocabulary
Comprehension
Spelling
• Promotes quicker and more accurate word reading
• Expands from unknown words to known words and word parts
• Provides grammatical information that helps with connected text reading
• Helps with non-phonetic English spellings
Thank you for your interest in Morphology
Mary Beth Calhoon, Ph.D. Associate Professor
Lehigh University