 This unit discusses the main principles and methods of analyzing words into their component parts. Focus of our analysis will be present-day English, but as you will see towards the end, I will use an example from another language. What will we proceed as follows? We will first of all look at types of words. Then we will define one particular type of word in more detail, namely variable words, and look at possible analyses of variable words. And we will then perform what you call a morphological analysis. So let's first of all look at types of words. Here you see a number of words, all English words, and they can be grouped into two types. Words that can modify their structure, variable words, and words that cannot change at all, the set of invariable words. So obviously woman is a variable word. You can have the genitive woman's plural women. Sweet is another variable word because you can form the comparative or the superlative like sweeter or sweets. Myself, a reflexive pronoun, is certainly invariable because you cannot add anything, you cannot reduce anything. We could perhaps say, okay, it's already two items, my and self, but that's a different story. Walk is clearly variable, it can be a noun or a verb, you can have walker, walkers, you can have walks, walked, walking, etc. The preposition about is clearly invariable. And finally the two conjunctions, coordinate conjunction, but and if are also invariable. We cannot do anything about these words. There are some languages that have by and large, well, if not exclusively, invariable words. Such languages are called isolating or analytic languages, and typical examples are Chinese or Vietnamese. So if you want to become a morphologist, don't move to China. There is hardly anything to do because all words or most words are invariable and they cannot be analyzed into further component parts. But in English, this is possible. So let's now perform a morphological analysis of some selected words. We know that we have to base our decisions on phonology for various reasons. Many languages do not have writing systems at all. Many languages have writing systems that are not phonetic in character, so called phonographic writing systems. In other words, to generalize our decision, and this is what linguistics is always about, a generalization of facts, rules across the languages of the world. We have to base our decisions on phonology. So here you find walks, misleads and classroom. And our first task is to insert boundaries between those parts which we think can somehow be isolated. So the boundary in morphology is this one. This hashtag is used as a boundary between so-called morphs. So clearly here in misleads, we have a boundary between mis and leads. We have a boundary which is clear between class and room in classroom. But then also we would have a boundary here. Lead and leads are two different forms and so is walk and walks. So these are our boundaries. Now what can we do with the results of our analysis? We can first of all group them into two types of morphs. We have so-called free morphs. That is morphs or elements that can stand on their own. They can occur without any additional components. So clearly our free morphs here are class, then room, then walk, and finally, whatever we've gotten, lead. Now the result of morphological analysis are first of all morphs. Morphs are indicated by these curly brackets in linguistics. So to be absolutely precise, I have to put curly brackets around my free morphs. So let's underline all three morphs here in green. What are we going to do with the others? Well, the others are not free anymore. They are bound morphs. They cannot stand on their own. They have to be attached to other elements. So we have a set called bound morphs. And let's underline them in blue. This is a bound morph. This is a bound morph. And here we have one. So let's look at our bound morphs. We have sir. And normally in order to indicate the position, where do they occur? You could occur, you could introduce a hyphen. This means it occurs after something. Then we have the z, the z, which occurs after something. And finally we have the miss that occurs before something else. And again we're using curly brackets to indicate that these are morphs. So this is the first step. We analyze words into their component parts. As a result we're getting morphs. Now let's take a closer look at our bound morphs, which occur in these examples. So here we have, let's first of all insert the morph boundaries again. And the morph boundaries again. So these are our boundaries. Here we have our free morphs. And these are our bound morphs. Oops. Okay. So let's analyze them in more detail and look what we can do with these three bound morphs. They somehow denote the same thing. Namely the third person singular present tense. If you attach these bound morphs to particular verbs, the result is the verb is transformed into the third person singular. The question is where do they occur? In what sort of position? Well, this one here, the sir. And now I represented everything very precisely phonetically. Again at the position marker in front of it. Now this one occurs at a word boundary after a morph boundary where the final element that precedes has the feature minus voice. So it must be voiceless. So you have example like stop stops. The P in stop is voiceless. Walk walks occur in walk is voiceless or hate hates. So this is where this one occurs. Now this one occurs in positions where the final element. Now print where the final element before the morph boundary is voiced as in goes. Vowels are voiced leads and so on. Well, in this one here, this is an interesting case. The last one it occurs after sir, sir, sir. And sir, if any of these occurs before the morph boundary, then this is too much here. Then we must insert is like in kisses, buzzes, matches, and so on. Okay, so we have three different contexts for our morphs. In other words, they occur in what we might want to call complementary distribution. You know this concept from the phoneme. Well, and these morphs, they can now be grouped into a family. The family has a head term. Unfortunately in morphology is also presented within curly brackets. And it's called the morpheme. Well, and here we have the choice. Whatever we want to insert here is up to us. We could do something like this. So it's the third person singular present tense morpheme, which has the three members. Or it is simply the default, which would be z, which occurs in most cases. After all voiced bound morphs, which are verbs go lead, et cetera. So we have several choices here. So this is one analysis in English. Let's now look at a different language. Here we have Latin. Now in Latin, we have inflectional so-called paradigms. Here we have the noun, which denotes the word king. And again, we have to do it phonetically. The analysis must be based on phonemes rather than on the orthography. So what can we do? First of all, let's insert the morph boundaries again. So here it is quite clear. We have reg, regi, regem, rega. By the way, this paradigm denotes the nominative case, the genitive case, the dative case, the accusative case, and the instrumental. These are cases. Now clearly, we have the bound morph, reg. The free morph, reg. But what are we going to do with regs? Now here we have a variant. You see, all our bound morphs are relatively clear. S, I, M, and E. But here we have a different free morph, reg. What are we going to do with that? Well, we do the same we did with the third person singular morphs in present day English. We have two variants. But now the two variants concerns the free morph. What does it mean? Well, it means king in both cases. And all we need is now a definition of the context. This one occurred in a very specific context. Namely, it occurs whenever the following element is an S. So in other words, here we have reg, here we have the boundary, and here we have sa added. This is the particular context for reg. Reg becomes reg if an S follows. Well, and this one occurs elsewhere in all other contexts. We must be a little bit careful, though we have just based our analysis of just one set of variants of one item, namely reg, regs. Nevertheless, we could group these two morphs, these two free morphs into a family, a morpheme, where we now would take the form that occurs as a default in most cases, as well some people call it as a normalized, as a generalized form. And that's of course reg with a specific morph mentioned here. Well, this is what we call morphological analysis. We analyze data into their morphs, and then we try to find out whether certain morphs belong to the same morpheme. So the morpheme is then the abstract head term. The family members of the morpheme are called morphs. And just like with the phoneme, if they belong to the same family, we call them alo morphs. Well, that's basically what we have to do in morphological analysis.