Agglutinative languages (Turkish) combine many morphemes into a word.

Synthetic languages add many inflections to words (Latin). In analytic languages, morphemes are not bound to one another (Chinese). 168).ĭifferent languages have different types of words. Morphology is the study of the meanings” (Freeman & Freeman, 2004, p. “Phonology is the study of the sounds of words. For example, adding the suffix er to the verb teach makes the word a noun. “Derivational affixes do change meaning and can be either prefixes or suffixes” (p. In addition, inflectional morphemes do not change the meaning of the base word. For example, adding s to tree doesn’t make the noun tree a verb.

“Inflectional morphemes add to a word without changing the part of speech” (p.167). The s in trees is a bound morpheme” (Freeman & Freeman, 2004, p. They cannot be written as separate words. Bound morphemes are units that must be attached or bound to a free morpheme. “Free morphemes are units that can stand alone as words by themselves. There are many types of morphemes that make up words. That is one reason linguists find it difficult to define word” (Freeman & Freeman, 2004, p. I found it to be very interesting that “the separation of words on a page is more of a convenience for readers than a reflection of a physical reality. “Like phonemes, words are perceptual units, not physical units” (Freeman & Freeman, 2004, p. Words such as contractions and words with hyphens make defining what constitutes a word. Morphology is the study of words but linguists have trouble defining the term word. In this chapter, the authors help us understand how linguists analyze words and how new words enter a language.

Summary of Chapter 7: Essential Linguistics, (Freeman & Freeman, 2004).Ĭhapter 7 is entitled, “English Morphology”.

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