Finally, we finished the topic Morphology. Meaning that, I have to write another reflection on it. Honestly, I’m running out of ideas again. I don’t know what I should write here but the funny thing is, I still write. I will try to gain ideas by reading. :)
Part of my readings is as follows:
"The term 'morphology' has been taken over from biology where it is used to denote the study of the forms of plants and animals. It was first used for linguistic purposes in 1859 by the German linguist August Schleicher (Salmon 2000), to refer to the study of the form of words. In present-day linguistics, the term 'morphology' refers to the study of the internal structure of words, and of the systematic form-meaning correspondences between words.”
Morphology. What is Morphology? When I “Google” the word Morphology on the internet, I was surprised that Morphology actually can be contributed to many types. For instances, Mathematical Morphology, Geomorphology, Biology Morphology, Astronomy Morphology, Linguistic Morphology, Urban Morphology, River Morphology et cetera. From my reading, I can conclude that morphology actually means the study of a structure, form or shape.
Obviously, for English class, we will learn the Linguistic Morphology. Wikipedia stated that Linguistic Morphology is the study of the structure and content of word forms. From my “linguistically” point-of-view, Morphology means the study of Morphemes and Morphemes are words, word stems, and affixes, basically the unit of language one up from phonemes.
The clearest learning that pops in my mind now is on affixes. There are several kind of affixes which are:
1. Suffixes are attached to the end of the stem;
2. Prefixes are attached to the front of the stem;
3. Infixes are put in the middle of the word;
4. Ablaut is a change in a vowel that carries extra meaning; and
5. Reduplication is a matter of doubling a syllable to do the same.
Above all, Suffixes are the most common, and English uses them. For example, the past tense of most verbs is a matter of adding -ed to the stem; the present participle is made by adding -ing; the plural of a noun is made by adding -s.
I would say morphology is fun, and it’s also a useful way of packing a lot of meaning into a small space, but sometimes there’s a tendency to get a little carried away with it. For instance; directionality of a line of blood drops, where the word direction would have done just as well. From a morphological standpoint, the noun directionality is formed from the noun direction, plus the suffix -al to turn it into an adjective, plus the suffix -ity to turn it back into a noun again.
Sometimes suffixes do carry specific meanings, such as employer and employee. But sometimes, as in the word directionality, I can’t see that they do the suffix -ality, in particular, often seems to serve the sole purpose of increasing the length of a word. To illustrate the ability of morphemes to carry specific meaning, consider invisibility. Without all those little morphemes, one would have to say something like “the property of not being able to be seen”, which is a long-long thing to say.
***To be continued (I’m running out of ideas again *sigh*)
