More About Morphemes

Today, I'd like to continue the discussion that we began with my last blog post (Oct. 17th). As you may recall, I mentioned a little about the background of the English vocabulary and then I introduced the study of morphemes as a way to help make vocabulary learning a little easier. In this post, I will describe some specific ways that this technique can be used and I'd like to discuss some of the categories of morphemes that many of us are familiar with already.


Last month, we studied the words "transport" and "bilingual" by breaking them down into smaller pieces, called morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest units of language that can convey meaning. The process of analyzing a word in smaller pieces is called parsing. Parsing is a great tool to use, but in some cases, it is most effective only if you are already familiar with the individual morphemes. In other words, if I can't recognize any of the parts of the word, it can be next to impossible to break it down for analysis. Therefore, in order to make the most of morphemes as language-study tools, it will take a little bit of work to memorize them.


However, one of the best things about morphemes is that some of them will be incredibly easy to learn. In fact, without realizing it, there are probably some that you already know. Take, for example, the morpheme auto. It means "self," and can be recognized in words like automobile, automatic, and autobiography. Inter, meaning "between or among" is another that can be often seen in common words like international, intermediate, and interrupt. So you can see that in some cases, the meaning of a morpheme can be simple to determine, and can also increase or deepen our understanding of a word's meaning.


There are also certain categories of morphemes that most people are familiar with, like prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes are types of morphemes that are attached to the beginning of words in order to alter the meaning of the word or, sometimes, to create a new word altogether. Suffixes serve the same function as prefixes, but are added to the end of a word. Here are a few examples of common prefixes and suffixes:
• Pre-, "before": prepared, precede, precaution
• Anti-, "against, opposite": antidote, antipathy, anti-war
• Con-/co-, "together, with": cooperate, conclude, concentrate
• Re-, "again, back": revise, react, reassure
• -able, adjective: countable, capable, disable, amiable
• -tion, noun: reaction, correction, subscription
• -ize, verb: finalize, theorize, organize


A special characteristic of suffixes that you may have picked up on is that they are often clues about the classification of a word. This means that it is often the end of the word that tells us if it is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb and so on. One of the ways that this knowledge of suffixes can help is when we determine how to use a word grammatically. This can especially be useful on tests when we need to identify different types of words. Just knowing that a word is a noun and not a verb, for example, can make a big difference in some cases.


The most practical application of this skill of parsing results from the ability to interpret meanings of individual morphemes. The benefits are valuable to both language learners and native speakers alike--everyone likes a shortcut when it comes to difficult words. If you'd like some advice on how to begin your own studies, come and find me at Kaplan and I have some materials I can give you.


Thanks for reading!




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・【Fun With Morphemes】2008.10.17 (Fri)

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