In English, there are two kinds of morpheme, there are free morpheme and
bound morpheme. A morpheme is free if it is able to appear as a word by itself. It is bound if it can only appear as part of a larger, multi-morphemic word. Every
morpheme is either free or bound. Free morphemes are also referred as roots.
Bound morphemes are also referred to as affixes, among which there are
prefixes , infixes, and suffixes.
a. prefixes: un-happy, re-write, pre-view b. suffixes: writ-ing, quick-ly, and neighbor-hood
c. infixes: very rare in English speech-o-meter Bound morphemes may be derivational or inflectional
A stem can be defined as a root to which an affix can be added. Thus, the root
dog is also a stem, because, even though it contains no affixes, an affix could be added to it - to form, e.g., dog-s. This notion is necessary because not all roots are
such that affixes can be added to them - e.g., of, or, I, etc.
2. Theories of Inflection and Derivation
According to Mark Aronoff and Fudeman Kirsten 2011: 2-4, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic pieces with a grammatical function. A
morpheme may be a word such as hand, or a meaningful component of a word, such as the
–ed of looked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. The term ‘morph’ is sometimes used to refer specifically to the phonological
realization of a morpheme. For example, the English past tense morpheme that is spelled
–ed has various morphs. It is realized as [t] after the voiceless [p] of jump cf. jumped, as [d] after the voiced [l] of repel cf. Repelled, and as [
ᵊd] after the
voiceless [t] of root or voiced [d] of wed cf. Rooted and wedded. These morphs are called allomorphs or variants which are the appearance of one morph over
another, in this case, is determined by voicing and the place of articulation of the final consonant of the verb stem. For example, the word reconsideration can be
analysis as three parts morphemes: re-, consider, and –ation. Consider is called
stem which means a base unit to which another morphological piece is attached. While {re-} and {
–ation} are called affixes. Affixes can be divided into two: inflectional affixes and derivational
affixes. According to Laurier Bauer 2003:14-15, inflection does not change the part of speech or the category of the base in the affixation process. Inflectional
affixes always have a regular meaning. In general rule, an inflectional affix can be added to all members of the class. Derivational affixes can change the part of
speech of the base. Derivational affixes can not be attached to all member of the class while inflectional affixes are fully productive, derivational affixes are not.
This theory is supported by Andrew Spencer 1998 in his researches in Russian languages. In that research, he found that traditional grammarians distinguish
between two main types of morphological operation, which called inflection or inflexion and derivation. He thinks that inflection in a word could not change the
categories from its original categories even the meaning is still the same. He states that since inflected forms are just variants of one and the same
words, inflecting a word shouldn’t cause it to change its categories. Moreover, even when a word can belong to more than one category, such
as the innumerable English words which are both nouns and verbs, we inflict the word either as a noun or as a verb Spencer,1998:9.
From those two theories, the definition of inflection is that inflection cannot cause a word to change its syntactic categories. Infection just changes the
forms while derivation is creating new words from old words or in literary point of view called ‘word formation’ and change the words in their syntactic category.
So, inflection is a result of applying processes to words which produced varies forms of the words while derivation is a result of combining morphemes which
include the changing of its syntactic categories.
3. Borrowing in the English Language
When two different languages have contact over a certain period of time, they will surely influence each other. Words might be taken over from one
language and are adapted to the other. This process is called borrowing. Katamba, Francis: 1994 Throughout its long history English had contact with many
different languages such as Old Norse, French, Latin, etc. Not only are whole words borrowed together with their meanings, but also
new words, namely neologisms, are generated on the basis of morphemes borrowed from those languages. In English, a product of such a process is
telephone from Greek tēle- meaning ‘afar, far off’ and phōnē meaning ‘sound,
voice’ Gramley, 2001; 24. The meaning of some of the new words
e.g:telephone are often not directly obvious to the average speaker of English, and thus, their meaning has to be learned. For example the adjective visible,
meaning ‘able to be seen’ has no direct association to the verb to see, and therefore the link between these two has to be established by learning. Gramley
therefore calls such words as visible “hard words” Gramley, 2001; 25. Those
loans, especially some from Greek and Latin, which are felt to be pretentious orand obscure by the average speaker of English are found to be denoted as “ink-
horn terms” Gramley, 2001; 25. Amongst the above mentioned reasons for borrowing from foreign languages, the most obvious and maybe also the most
profound one is the introduction of new concepts for which there are no suitable words in the task language. Concerning this, Katamba writes that that at various
periods in world history different civilizations have been pre-eminent in one field or another like for example sciences, trade, military, and medicine. According to
him, the normal course of development was then that the language of this civilization became the lingua franca for that specific field during the period of
their pre-eminence Katamba, 1994; 195. This is also reflected by the concentration of borrowings in certain semantic fields from that language to
others.
4. Theory of Phonology and Phonetics
According to Beverley Collins and Inger M.Mees, phonology is concerned with the ways in which these speech sounds form systems and pattern in human
language. The word phonology refers either to the representations of sounds and sound patterns in a speaker’s grammar or to the study of the sound pattern in a
language or in human language in the general. Phonetics is a part of phonology, and provides the means for describing speech sounds. Most of the words in a
language differ both in form and meaning, sometimes by just one sound. For example, the difference between sip and zip is signaled by the fact that the initial
sound of the word is s [s] and the initial sound of the second word is z [z]. The
