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October 02, 2005
Chapter 3 Morphology Question
• The advantage to having morphological modifications to words is someone who knows the meanings of bound morphemes in a language can learn a new word in that language and then attach prefixes or suffixes to the word to learn more words simply by knowing the bound morphemes. This is easier than learning individual words for each meaning a bound morpheme has. For example, if a student were learning English and they knew the meanings of the prefix “un” to be the opposite and the suffix “ness” to make an adjective a noun and learned the meaning of the adjective “desirable” they would know the meanings of “undesirable”, “desirableness”, and “undesirableness” merely through attaching the prefixes and suffixes to “desirable.” Making grammatical connections through bound morphemes is often easier to memorize than learning separate words for the opposite of “desirable”, the noun of “desirable”, and the noun of the opposite of “desirable.” As for flexibility, it seems in the English language bound morphemes are constantly added to content words whether it is true to the rules of prescriptive grammar or not.
Posted by lcisfreya at October 2, 2005 10:32 PM