Hi. We're going to talk about morphology:
the part of linguistics that studies the
parts of the words.
So there are many
words that are just a single part where
it's a single element that has one
meaning. For example, the word tree just
means the living being in the forest and
if you split the word tree it would
cease to mean anything. If you take tr and ee
for example none of those things
neither of those things mean tree
and now the meaning is lost.
Likewise, if you take a word like house, the place
where you live and split it into hou and se
neither of these parts means house, you
will have lost the meaning. So tree and
house are a single element with a single
meaning. But there are many words that
can be split into different parts so for
example the word pets. In the word pets
it's kind of intuitive that there are
two units there's pet which is the
animal that accompanies you and s which
means that there's more than one of this
animal. So there's like a core meaning
pet and then s which is like a grammatical
addition to it. In the word waits like
they - like the person waits, you have
wait which is the action the main
meaning and then s which in this case
means that he/she - they are waiting. In
the word taller, for example, you have a
core meaning which is to be tall and
then the er which means that someone
is this taller than someone else. So
words like pets, waits, and taller can
have more than one part in them and they
have - they gain full meaning when they are
joined together but you can split them
and the parts will still have meanings
of their own.
Each of these parts that
has a meaning of their own it's a
minimal unit of meaning and we call
these morphemes.
So you can have morphemes like
wait, tall, house, tree, that have full
meanings, and you can have other
morphemes that are - add grammatical
meaning to the words. In English for
example, the morpheme s in waits means
that it's a third person. The morpheme
ed in waited means that the action
of waiting was done in the past, and the
morpheme ing in waiting means that the
action is done progressively,
continuously. As you can see, nouns have
- can also be compounded with other
morphemes like the plural s and
adjectives can be compounded 
with things like er, tall taller.
So you can have one
word with one or more morphemes. Tree is
a word with one morpheme, tree, and
trees is a word with two morphemes, tree s.
You - and indeed we have two main types of
morphemes: the roots which are the core
meaning like tree and the affixes which add
grammatical meetings such as the s in
trees, and wait s, the ing in wait ing 
which adds a little bit of grammatical
meaning to the word.
There are different
types of affixes. So English has a kind
of affix called a suffix: these are
affixes that go after the root so you
have a root like wait which is the
action of waiting and then you add s
after the root or ing, waits waiting waited. 
You have the root and then the
suffix. This is the right way to
connect the affixes in English. You
cannot have a word in English like ingwait 
where the ing would precede the
root. You need to have the - the 
ing after the root.
Spanish, French, German, many languages
that you might be familiar with also use
suffixes where you have the root and
then the affixes come after the root.
In some languages like Turkish, you can have more than one suffix after the root so
in the Turkish word, and pardon my
Turkish, uygarlastiramadiklarimizdanmissinizcasina,
behaving as a
viewer amongst those whom we could not
civilize. And yes that is one word. You
have a root uygar and then las tir
ama dik lar imiz dan mis siniz casina, several suffixes that go after the root.
So English, Spanish, French, German,
Turkish, their affixes go after the root. They
are suffixes. There's many languages
where the grammatical affixes actually
go before the root. They're called
prefixes. Swahili is one such language so
for example we have roots like soma to
read and we have words, these are just
one word, ninasoma, another word nilisoma, 
and another word nitasoma: I'm
reading, I was reading, and I will read. In
all of these, the root soma is what comes
at the end of the word and at the
beginning of the word what we have is
the prefix ni which means that I, I'm
doing the reading.
There's another prefix
and - before the root which is na, li or
ta which is the conjugation so one of
them is the present tense, I am reading, I
was reading, I will read. Notice that in
English, we do the past with a suffix so
I wait ed. In Swahili, you do the past
with a prefix.
So we have roots that have the core
meaning of the word, prefixes and
suffixes. There's other types of affixes
that you might find. English has a kind
called an infix. In an infix, you take a
root and you break it in half and then
put the affix right in the middle. For
example, in fan-freaking-tastic you have
a root like fantastic then you break it
because fan and tas -
fantastic is not made of a fan and
tastic. Fantastic is really just one
unit, but you split it in two and insert
freaking right in the middle. There's
other words in English that can do this
as well: fan-bloody-tastic for example.
There's something called a circumfix in
other languages. English doesn't have
these, but in Arabic for example when you
want to say no in a verb, like I didn't
write, you need to say ma the root and
then sh. Maktabtsh, I didn't write. And so
the affix has 2 parts around the root.
In reduplication, you have the root and
you do it twice. So rumahrumah is 
Bahasa Indonesian for houses and it comes from
the word rumah which is just one house.
So we have affixes which add grammatical meaning
and roots which are the core meaning. But
all the roots that we've looked at so
far are kind of strung together so if
you have walk the sounds walk are all
bundled up together.
There's languages where the roots are
discontinuous, where the roots have their
letters separated, their sounds separated
and then the conjugation is a kind of
interleaving of other sounds in the
middle of the roots. For example, in the
first - these are words in Arabic, the
first row has darasa, madrasa, adrus: he
studied, school, and I study. So all these
forms have in common the constants d r s
and then the conjugation
of the root drs is an interleaving of a
pattern between the consonants. So the
past for the third person masculine,
he studied, is the first consonant, the
letter, the - the sound a, the second
consonant, the sound a, the third
consonant and the sound a. Darasa. To say
that there's a place where you study you
have the sounds ma, then the first
consonant, the second consonant then
either an a or an i depending on the
root, the third consonant and then an a.
Madrasa. Finally for the present first
person singular, so I study, you have the
sound a, the consonant one: a d, the
consonant two: the r, either an i or an u
depending on the root, in this case u, and
the consonant three: which is s. Adrus.
So adrus. In the interweaving of the
root and the pattern, you make the
conjugation of verbs in Arabic, which is
very different from how we conjugate
verbs in English. You can see this in
other roots for example ktb is to write.
Kataba, maktab, aktub: he wrote, desk, I write.
in summary, morphemes are minimal
units of meaning. You can have one word
with multiple morphemes, each of them
adding some gradation of meaning to the
word. There's roots that have the core
meaning and then there's affixes which
add some grammatical meaning. The affixes
can be before the root, we call those
prefixes, they can come after the root, we
call those suffixes, and there's other
types as well, so there's infixes circumfixes
and reduplication. Some roots like
those in English, Spanish, French, German
Japanese are continuous and some roots
are not, like those in Arabic.
This is optional but just in case you're
wondering: one of the operations we're
going to be doing is called stemming. And so
far we've only be talking about roots. In
English we will assume that roots and
stems are roughly the same thing but in
other languages they're slightly different.
So the root is the one that has the core
meaning of the verb and the stem is the
core meaning plus the conjugational
type or category. So if you've studied
a language - language like Spanish,
French, Japanese, you'll remember that in
order to conjugate a verb you have to
learn the verb itself and then the
conjugation category like do I conjugate
this like an er verb, like an ar verb and
so forth. In Spanish comer, to eat, is
conjugated differently from parar, to
stop, because one ends in er and ones in -
ends in ar. So the root is just the
initial segments com, par which are
the ones that have the meaning and then
the stem is the following - is the root
plus the following vowel: come, para.
Once we have the stem unit we can
conjugate the verb for all of its
alternatives. So comemos, we eat
versus paramos we stop. So in other
languages there are differences between
a root and a stem, but in English we
will assume that roots and stems are the
same thing. In videos further down the
week we will look at how stemming can
help us with our searches along texts.
Thank you!
