Topic: Computational
Morphology
Morphology
• Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies
word structure, especially in terms of morphemes.
It’s the study of word formation (as inflection,
derivation, and compounding) in language.
Morphemes
• A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit
in a language. In other words, it is the smallest
meaningful unit of a language. The field of
study dedicated to morphemes is called
morphology.
Types of
Morphemes
Free Morpheme Bound Morpheme
Lexical Functional
Morphemes Morphemes
Derivational Inflectional
Morphemes Morphemes
1. Free Morphemes:
• Free morphemes can occur alone.
Example:
• An example of a free morpheme is “bad”.
2. Bound Morphemes:
• Bound morphemes must occur with another morpheme.
Example:
• An example of a "bound base" morpheme is -sent in the
word dissent.
Types of free Morphemes:
1. Lexical Morphemes:
Lexical morphemes are called open class words and include
nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. New words can regularly
be added to this group.
Examples:
Examples are girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere,
Open, look, follow, and break.
2. Functional Morphemes:
• Functional morphemes, or closed class words, are
conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns; and new
words cannot be (or are very rarely) added to this class.
Example:
• Examples are and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in,
the, that, it, them.
Types of Bound Morphemes:
Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes
• There are two categories of affixes: derivational and
inflectional morphemes. The main difference between the
two is that derivational affixes are added to morphemes to
form new words that may or may not be the same part of
speech.
• Inflectional affixes are added to the end of an existing word
for purely grammatical reasons. In English there are only eight
total inflectional affixes:
• Noun + -s’ –s
• Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en
• Adjective+ -er, -est
Morphological Description
• Inflectional morpheme never change the grammatical
category of a word.
• Old (Adjective) Older (Adjective)
• While derivational morpheme can change the grammatical
category of a word.
• Teach (Verb) Teacher (Noun)
Word formation Process:
Definition:
Word Formation Process (also called Morphological Process) in
which new words are produced either by modification of existing
words or by completely inventing new words, which in turn
become a part of the existing Language.
Clipping:
• As the name suggests, clipping is the word formation
process in which a word is reduced to a shorter form.
Example:
❑ lab is the clipped form of laboratory.
.
Back Clipping Fore-Clipping
Clipping
Middle-Clipping Complex Clipping
i. Back clipping
▪ Example: Ad from advertisement.
ii. Fore-clipping:
▪ Example: Phone from telephone.
iii. Middle clipping:
▪ Example: Flu from influenza.
iv. Complex clipping:
▪ Example: Cablegram from Cabletelegram.
Compounding
• Also called composition, by this process two or more than two
words are combined together to create a single word, having
a single idea and function.
• For example:
life + style → lifestyle
mother + in + law → mother-in-law
shopping + mall → shopping mall
Coinage:
• Also called invention, is a morphological process by which
new words are invented.
• Coinage is a word formation process in which new words are
created either deliberately or accidentally.
• Examples:
▪ Hero+in= Heroin
▪ Hot+spot=Hotspot
▪ Smart+phone= Smartphone
Borrowing (Loan words)
• Borrowing is one of the most common sources of getting new
words in English. This refers to the words adopted from other
languages.
• English language has adopted a vast number of loan words
from other languages.
• For example:
• Alcohol (Arabic)
• Boss (Dutch)
• Piano (Italian)
• Robot (Czech)
• Zebra (Bantu)
Blending:
• Blending is a morphological process in which the parts of two
or more words are combined together to form a new word.
Usually, the parts consist of the beginning of one word and
the end of the other word.
• Example
• Smoke +fog = Smog
• Breakfast + lunch → brunch
Acronyms:
• These words are formed with the initial letters of a set of
other words.
• Examples:
• Compact Disk – CD
• Video Cassette Recorder – VCR
• Personal Identification Number –PIN
Morphological Parsing
• Morphological Parsing in Natural Language Processing
is the process to determining the morphemes from
which the given word is constructed. Morphological
Analysis is the process of analyzing words into the
Linguistic components(morphemes).
• Morphological parsing provide us the Knowlgeds of
how much morphemes present in a particular word.
• Morphological Parsing also provide us the history
behind a word wither it is a
noun/pronoun/verb/adverb.
Applications
• The generally accepted approach to
morphological parsing is through the use of a
finite state transducer (FST), which take inputs in
words and outputs their stem and modifiers.
• Etymology Explorer Applications are used to find
out the origin of a word.
• Automated Grammar Checker
Instantly find and correct over 250 types of
grammatical mistakes.
• WhiteSmoke is a complete grammar checker
built for all devices.
• The Nounshoun app uses Artificial
Intelligence to find parts of speech for any
English sentence.
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Thank you
