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

bethcalhoon@lehigh.edu