Introduction

The short answer to the question with which we begin this text is that morphology is the study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined in the languages of the world, and the way forms of words are varied depending on how they’re used in sentences. As a native speaker of your language you have intuitive knowledge of how to form new words, and every day you recognize and understand new words that you’ve never heard before.

Stop and think a minute:

• Suppose that splinch is a verb that means ‘step on broken glass’; what is its past tense?

• Speakers of English use the suffixes -ize (crystallize) and -ify (codify) to form verbs from nouns. If you had to form a verb that means ‘do something the way ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair does it’, which suffix would you use? How about a verb meaning ‘do something the way exPresident Bill Clinton does it’?

• It’s possible to rewash or reheat something. Is it possible to relove, reexplode, or rewiggle something?

Chances are that you answered the first question with the past tense splinched (pronounced [splɪnʧt]), the second with the verbs Blairify and Clintonize, and that you’re pretty sure that relove, reexplode, and rewiggle are weird, if not downright impossible. Your ability to make up these new words, and to make judgments about words that you think could never exist, suggests that you have intuitive knowledge of the principles of word formation in your language, even if you can’t articulate what they are. Native speakers of other languages have similar knowledge of their languages. This topic is about that knowledge, and about how we as linguists can find out what it is. Throughout this topic, you will be looking into how you form and understand new words, and how speakers of other languages do the same. Many of our examples will come from English – since you’re reading this, I assume we have that language in common – but we’ll also look beyond English to how words are formed in languages with which you might be familiar, and languages which you might never have encountered before. You’ll learn not only the nuts and bolts of word formation – how things are put together in various languages and what to call those nuts and bolts – but also what this knowledge says about how the human mind is organized.

The beauty of studying morphology is that even as a beginning student you can look around you and bring new facts to bear on our study. At this point, you should start keeping track of interesting cases of new words that you encounter in your life outside this class.