CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.2 Background to the Study
Language, an indispensable tool for human communication, is studied in divergent ways. Irrespective of the area in which it is being studied, the most central to language and relevant to human communication is the word. Words play an integral role in the human ability to use language with an infinite capacity of expressions. As a result of this, word is involved in almost all the levels of linguistic studies and analysis. Words are generally classified into phonological, grammatical, morph syntactic, content and function words.
It is important to note that every word in the lexicon of a native speaker is encoded with phonological, syntactic, semantic and, above all, morphological information. A native speaker of a language knows how to structure the words of the speaker in accordance with the morphological rules of the language, and also how to order the sequence of words correctly to form expressions or sentences in accordance with syntactic rules. The aspect of linguistics which deals with words and their entire upshots is morphology. The goal of every morphological study, therefore, is to discover and make explicit the rules or principles, patterns, processes and systems that underlie the morphological processes in a language. It is possible, for instance, to break down Hausa word “budurwai” (girls) into smaller structural units: “budurwai” = “budurwa” + “i”. The analysis here shows that “budurwai” (girls) can be broken down into two parts. This includes the first part “budurwa”, which refers to something in the world (+ young + female + human) and the second part “i” indicates a grammatical category of a number specifying plural. The same approach can easily be applied to the word “faraa” (started), which can be analyzed thus: “Faraa = ‘fara’ (start) + ‘a’, equivalent to English past tense morpheme (-ed). However, while” budurwa” can be described as a noun, “fara” (start) is a verb and the second part ‘-a’ indicates past tense to the verb “fara” (start).
In morphological terms, the minimal parts of the words that have been analyzed above are called morphemes. Not only are these morphemes considered as the ultimate elements of morphological analysis, but they serve as the building blocks of meaning and grammar. Unlike phonemes, morphemes have a physical, that is phonological and phonetic form, and they have meaning or function. With this, it is plausible that a morpheme is attached to words to serve a grammatical purpose as well as a semantic function.
In linguistics, morphology according toMark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudemanrefers to “the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and howthey are formed” (1).Ephraim Chukwu states that “it originally means the study of shapes or forms used in biology, but since the middle of 19th century, it has been used to describe the type of investigation which analyzes all those basic linguistics elements which are usually in language” (1). George Yule explains that “these elements are technically known as morphemes in linguistics” (75) Leonard Bloomfield highlights four morphological types of language as follows:
- Isolating languages which are those used by the Chinese. They have no bound forms and a great majority of morphemes remain independent words.
- Agglutinative language: here, the bound forms are supposed merely to follow one another, e.g., Turkish.
- Polysynthetic: these are languages that express, semantically, important elements such as verbal goals by means of bound forms as does Eskimos.
- Inflectional language shows a merging of semantically distinct features either in a single bound forms or in a close united bound forms as when the suffix Ō in a Latin form like ‘amō’ ‘I live’, etc. English is a good example of a fissional or inflected language in which morphemes are squeezed together and are often changed dramatically in the process. All these can be a confusing concept, but looking at the morphology of the English language in its form, it retains a number of remnants (193).
Morphology, therefore, studies how words are put together from their smallest parts and the rules governing this process. It is the branch of linguistics which deals with forms of words in different constructions. Charles Hocket sees morphology as “the grammatical study of words on construction of morphemes” (200). Eugene Nida states that “morphology is the study of morphemes and their arrangements in word formation” (100). Morpheme may be
identified by its distribution and certain other characteristics.
The meaning of morpheme has received a lot of controversial ideas from many linguists. According to Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary, morpheme means the way units are ordered to give meaningful words. Some linguists approach the issue of the meaning of morpheme as form of units which have a meaning but based their combinations on distribution, while other linguists see morpheme as form of composite unit. Bloomfield asserts that we can attribute any meaning of phoneme and cannot analyze the meaning of morpheme (193). Jacek Fisiak, identifies with Bloomfield Leonard, et al, as the advocates of morphemes as units that have no meaning on their own (100). Note also that Allan Gleason (208) also describes morphemes as short sequence of phonemes. Since phoneme is said to be meaningless, then morpheme as well is meaningless. What then is morpheme?
According to General Basic Dictionary, a morpheme is a linguistic unit of the system of words distinguishing sounds of a language as ideally represented by single letter of the letters of alphabet; that is, phonemes are speech sounds. Earlier, however, John Carrol (50) and his contemporaries describe morpheme as a form which embodies grammatical and lexical meanings. It is not all morphemes that have meaning. For instance ‘does’ in ‘does he’ is said to be a dummy morpheme because it has no meaning in the context, but has function which is to show that it is the question and singular; therefore it is a dummy.
Hocket (199) further asserts that morphemes are the smallest indivisibly meaningful elements in the utterances of a language. This means that morphemes are indivisible. That is, they cannot be divided and still have meanings. For example, the word ‘compound’ cannot be sub-divided into com + pound. Furthermore, David Crystal (300) defines a morpheme as a smallest bit of a language which has meaning and, moreover, this meaning is different from the meaning of all other morphemes in the language. What he is saying is that if a morpheme is added or removed from an utterance, the meaning of the utterance changes.
Crystal identifies morphemes by comparing a wide variety of utterances. He looks for utterances which are partially the same. A morpheme could be described as the minimal linguistic unit, but it is not every small unit that is a morpheme as there are other characteristics that help one to identify a morpheme. According to Nida (100), there are also some criteria for the identification, recognition and understanding of morphemes.
The length of a word does not determine the number of morphemes in it. For example, the word “discipline” has ten letters of the alphabet but has one morpheme. Likewise, the word “category” is a word with eight letters of the alphabet but has one morpheme. The word “oxen” has four letters of the alphabet but has two morphemes. “ox” is a lexical morpheme while “-en” is a grammatical morpheme meaning plurality.
A morpheme may be a word or part of a word. The form of a morpheme and that of a word sometimes overlaps so that one concept presupposes the other (John Lyons 32). A morpheme is not always an equivalent to a word. For instance, the grammatical unit such as “dig” and “-er” in English are morphemes while “dig” is a word and can stand on its own, “er” cannot stand independently as a word because it is a part of a word. In the Hausa language, the grammatical unit “manoomaa” (farmers) has ‘-ma’ and ‘noomaa’. While ‘noomaa’ (farming) is a word and can stand on its own to give meaning, ‘-ma’ is a morpheme that cannot stand independently as a word to make a meaning. In addition, morphemes cannot be divided into smaller parts without destroying or altering the meaning of the word. For instance, if the word “straight” is broken into /strei/ and /t/, /strei/ of course has a meaning which though not related to the meaning of the word “straight” is still a morpheme; but /t/ is a meaningless remainder. Therefore, /strei/ is not a morpheme so long as the word “straight” is concerned. Similarly, the word “tauraaroo” (star) cannot be divided into tau + raa + roo because they are meaningless parts. This therefore, characterizes the word as consisting of a single morpheme.
