English Morphology, Essay Example

Morphology is defined as the study of words, but a major problem that is encountered in the study of languages is how to define what a word is. While words are conventionally defined as units that are separated by a space, this becomes complicated when contraction words are used. This confusion also applies to words in which more than one unit is used to describe something that could be assigned a single word. The introductory discussion in the textbook was particularly interesting to me because it allowed me to think about words in depth. For example, in a sense, words can be defined as basic units of ideas, although there are exceptions even for this definition. Words such as “the” may not be representative enough of a concept to fall under this consideration.

Interestingly, even though words appear to be the smallest unit of a sentence, they can be broken down into even smaller units called morphemes. Some words have only one morpheme and are therefore in a simpler form. Morphemes are typically bound to affixes, which include prefixes and suffixes. Affixes have the ability to change the meaning of a word based on what’s added. According to the textbook “inflectional morphemes add to a word without changing the part of speech” and derivational affixes “change meaning and can be either prefixes or suffixes”. Thus a word root can be built upon in many different ways.

Since many different kinds of words can be made from combining roots, prefixes, and suffixes, there is a need to classify words. In the English language, a sentence could be understood by examining words and by determining how they are used. In most cases, the order of words is relevant to the meaning of the sentence. For example, the subject of a sentence frequently becomes at the beginning or the end of it and is emphasized by the other words because it is what the sentence is about. Verbs and adjectives are typically found near the subject because they provide the action or description, respectively, of the subject of the sentence.

Understanding the English language also requires the understanding of a variety of function words. These words have a variety of meanings in English and are used to confer meanings. One of the most important function word groups are pronouns and conjunctions because they are responsible for allowing sentences to come together. Prepositions include in, before, and of, and are used to describe the relationship between words in a sentence. Meanwhile, conjunctions include and, if, and however, and are used to tie the sentence together. Therefore, different types of words play different roles in sentences and effective English speakers are able to define how they function together to confer meaning.

This chapter was particularly interesting to me due to the basic understanding I have of languages such as Spanish and Latin. A major difference I have noticed between the English and Spanish languages is that in English, adjectives frequently come before the noun, but this is opposite in Spanish. This is also true of many phrases in Italian and French. Furthermore, the logical order of words in a sentence is completely different in Latin. The placement of words in a sentence in this language matters significantly less than it does in English. Therefore, it is not surprising that English learners have difficulty learning the language because the basic structures differ so significantly.