3 Roots, stems and affixes • Roots are the innermost constituents of words • A stem is anything to which another morpheme may be added and which has a syntactic category such as noun or verb • An affix is any non-root morpheme which attaches to another morpheme. • A suffix is an affix which attaches to the right. • A prefix is an affix which attaches to the left.

1.1-What is Morphology? (1) The field of linguistics that examines the internal structure of words and processes of word formation is known as Morphology. So, we study Morphology to know the internal structure of words and the segmentation into different kinds of morphemes is essential to the two basic purposes of morphology:

of morphology, why they might be like they are, how they are learned, comprehended and produced, and change over time. Syllabus (Chapters from G. Booij The Grammar of Words) Week 1–2 Introduction, basic concepts Chapters 1, 2 & 12 Week 3-4 Derivation & Compounding Chapters 3 & 4 Week 5-6 Inflection & Paradigms

Morphology, which was published in 1949, codified structuralist theory and practice. Itintroduced generations oflinguists to the descriptive analysis of words. The structuralists' methodological insistence on the separation oflevels whichwe notedabovewas a mistake, as weshallseebelowinsections (1.3.2)

Lisa Pearl LING200, Summer Session I, 2004 C. blends = words created from 2 nonmorphemic parts of already existing words a. smog (from smoke and fog) b. spam (from spiced and ham) D. backformation = word created by removing a morpheme perceived as an affix from an already existing word a. self-destruction self-destruct b. swindler swindle

Jóola morphology that is close to the topic of the chapter. By the end of the book, the student should have a reasonable grasp of the entire system of Kujamaat Jóola morphology and thus understand how, at least for one language, the whole of the morphology holds together. Of course, no one language can be representative of all the world’s lan-