Concept of Morphology (Word, Word Form, and Lexeme)
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INTRODUCTION
A. Background
What makes humans different from every other species on the planet? Answers vary from our use of tools, out creation of a society, or our advanced technological development. However, one essential factor underlies all the rest: the ability to communicate.
Humans are the only species that have a language. Sure, animals do communicate: Dolphins click messages through the water, wolves howl in packs, and deer flick their tails to warn of danger, and some apes can even learn sign language. However, none of these examples are even close to the advanced verbal communication found in humans.
This bring us to linguistics, or the study of language and its structure. Many scientist have devoted their lives to understanding how language developed, how it’s currently changing, and what it might becone in the future. There are many aspects of language to study, but in our assignment, we wil focus on morphology especially the meaning morphology, word, word form and lexeme.
B. Problem Statement
Based on the background above, the research question as follow :
- What is the meaning of morphology and the example ?
- What is word and the example ?
- What is word form and the example ?
- What is lexeme and the example ?
C. Purpose
The objectives of this research based on research problem above are:
- To know what is the meaning of morphology and the example of morphology
- To understand what is word and to know the example
- To know what is word form and the example
- To understand what is lexeme and to know the example of lexeme
DISCUSSION
A. History of Morphology
Before nineteenth century, morphology did not emerge as a distinct sub-branch of linguistic. But now, morphology is a distinct sub-branch of linguistic.
In 1786, Sir William Jones claimed that Sanskrit Latin, Persian, and Germanic languages were descended from a common ancestor. In 1816, Franz Boop supporting Sir Jones finding his evidence was based on comparisonof the grammatical endings of words in these language.
In 1889, under the influence of Darwinian Theory of evolution, Mark Muller delivered his lectures in Oxford that the study of the evolution of words illuminated the evolution of language just as in biology morphology. His specific claim was that the study of the 400-500 basic roots of the Indo-European ancestors of many of the languages of Europe and Asia was the key to understanding the origin of human language.
In 1993, Katamba argues that such evolutionary pretensions were abandoned vvery early in the history of morphology. He said that in this country, morphology is regarded as an essential sycrhroic discipline, which is a discipline focusing on the study of word structure at one stage in the life of a language rather on the evolution of words.
Linguistic analyses also proposed a separation of levels in linguistic :
- Semantic level (dealing with meaning)
- Syntactic level (dealing with sentence-structure)
- Morphological level (dealing with word-structure)
- Phonology/phonemics (dealing with sound system)
The analyst producing a description of a language was seen as one of working out, in separate stages. The levels were assumed to be ordered in a hierarchy. But, in 2002, Hanafi added pragmatics to the separation of linguistics levels, because language use cannot be described
- Pragmatic level (dealing with language in use)
- Semantic level (dealing with meaning)
- Syntactic level (dealing with sentence-structure)
- Morphological level (dealing with word-structure)
- Phonological/phonemics (dealing with sound system)
B. The Meaning of Morphology
The term morphology is Greek and is a makeup of morpho- meaning ‘shape, form’, and –ology which means ‘the study of something’. We are going to stick to morphology in linguistic, as the scientic study of form and structure of words in a language. Morphology as a sub-discipline of linguistics was named for the first time in 1859 by the German linguist August Schleicher who used the term for the study of the form of words. Today mophology forms a part of linguistics and there are so many definitions of morphology that have been introduced by linguistics such as :
- Crystal (1980:232-242)
- Bauer (1983:33)
- Dobrovolsky (1989:89-99)
- Verhaar (1996:97)
- Nida (1974:1)
- Katamba (1997:30)
This is the understanding of morphology according to experts, general mophology is the study of the structure and form of words in language or a language, including inflection, derivation, and the formation of compounds. In generally, morphology is divided into two field : the study of inflection and the study of word formation.
When we study about inflection, its mean that we study about the various form of lexeme meanwhile when we study about word formation, its mean that we study about a new lexeme from certain bases. Not only that, the word formation divided into derivation and compounding
C. Word, Word Form, and Lexeme
1. Word
Word is the important thing in language. Everyone knows that language as communication used by society. Word can be defined as a sound or a combination of sound that representation in writing symbolizes a meanin.
- Crystal (1980:283-285)
- Leonard Bloomfield
- Oxford
- Dobrovolsky (1989:91)
- Srijono (2010:49)
The statement of Srijono about the definition, we can conclude that the words can be stood by itself. For example word: boy, girl, cook, etc. All of this word cannot be divide into smaller unit that can convey meaning when they stand alone.
Futhermore, from the point of view its form, there are two kinds of word in human language, such as simple word and complex word. Simple words are words that cannot be analysed into smaller meaningful units, while complex words are words that can be analyzed into constituent parts indicating a recognizable meaning.
It’s not easy to define word, because word is a minimal free form, which can occur in isolation and have meaning but which cannot be analysed into elements which can all occur alone and also have meaning. Another difficulties when treating word is the term word itself, word cannot be separated from word form and lexeme.
2. Word formation
In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word is sometime contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word’s meaning. Word formation process is a way of forming new words or term from the use of old words. There are several way word formation processes:
- Coinage/invention
- Borrowing
- Compounding
- Blending
- Clipping/truncation
- Backformation
- Conversion
- Acronyms
- Derivation
- Echoism/symbolism/onomatopoeia
- Folk etymology
- Reduplication
- Multiple processes.
There are numerous word formation processes that do not arose any controversies and are very similar in the majority of language in changing or making a new word.
3. Lexeme
In linguistics, a lexeme is the fundamental unit of the lexicon (or word stock) of a language. Also known as a lexical unit, lexical item, or lexical word.
A lexeme is the smallest or minimal unit of lexicon in a language that bears some “meaning”. A lexeme has a morphological form, semantic content (or meaning) and a syntactic category. Lexeme is basically an abstract notion used in linguistic morphology, the concrete realisation of which is a word.
Acccording to Kridalaksana (1982:98) lexeme is an abstract lexical unit underlying various inflected forms of a words. One lexeme can take up more than one inflection to form a set of many words known as inflected variants. For examples, the lexeme PLAY can take up many forms like play, playing, plays, and played. All of these word forms have the same basic meaning (which is denoted by action) and, hence, will be categorised under the same lexeme.
As a coclusion the lexem is abstract, its conventional to choose one of the inflected forms to represent it, such as infinitive of the verb or the singular of the noun.
The same word form may in fact represented different lexemes, such as:
- Homonym, is a sigle orthographic and phonological word standing for two lexemes, as bear is either the verb or the noun
- Homograph, is a single orthographic word (but separate phonological words) standing for two lexemes, aslead is either the noun /led/ or the verb /li;d/
- Homophone, is a dingle phonological eord (but separate orthoghraphical words) standing for two lexemes, as /mi:t/ can be a noun meat or the verb meet.
CLOSING
A. Conclusion
When we study about morphology, its mean that we are studying about the structure and form of words in language or a language, including inflection, derivation, and the formation of compounds. Its very important to study about the mrphology, because we can know how the word/morpheme change into a several word that have different meaning according to the context.
Morphology makes us know about the relation between the word, word formation, lexeme and etc.
B. Suggestion
Based on this paper, its hard to explain the meaning of mophology, word, word form and lexeme because our lack in vocabulary force us to type the context of statement that we get and we dont know how to understand the meaning, because of the reason, our group realize that we have to get many reference from book and the lecture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kalsum, M.Pd.
New York Oxford.2008.Oxford learner’s pocket and dictionary. Oxfor University Press.
http://www.ilmubahasainggris.com
Packer.2001.morphology paper.Handout for psy 598-02.
Akmajian, A.et.al.2001.Linguistics.Cambridge:MIT Press.
Aronoff, fudeman.morphology and morphological analysis.Blackwell Publishing.
Laurier Bauer. 1983. English Word Formation. Cambridge University.
Abdul Haris Sunubi. 2016. Introduction To Linguistic. dirah
