A BRIEF DISCRIPTION OF MORPHOLOGY 1

5 2. A BRIEF DISCRIPTION OF MORPHOLOGY 2.1 The Definition of Morphology Morphology is a field of linguistics study that focused on the formation of words in a language. It means that how the words made from a morpheme or the morphemes as like as E.A Nida says that morphology is the study of morphemes and their arrangements in forming words. While Coates stated on his book 1999:8 morphology is morph-ology, the second element meaning ‘the academic study of word’, as in psychology, biology and so on. The first element is an adaptation of the Greek word meaning ‘form’ or ‘shape’. It was also present in morpheme. So a morpheme is a separate or distinctive unit of the form or shape words. Words will tend to have structure for some purpose, which is why morphemes typically have a meaning of their own. Bloomfield 1933:207 says that by morphology of a language we mean the constructions in which bound forms appear among the constituents. By definition, the resultants forms are either bound forms or words, but never phrases. Accordingly, we may say that that morphology includes the constructions of words and parts of words. Morphology, the study of the structure and form of words in language or a language, include: inflection, derivation, and the formation of compounds. At the basic level, words are made of “morphemes”. These are the smallest units of meaning: roots and affixes prefixes and suffixes. Native speakers recognize the morphemes as grammatically significant or meaningful. For example, “schoolyard” is made of “school” + “yard”, “makes” is made of “make” + a Universitas Sumatera Utara 6 grammatical suffix “-s”, and “unhappiness” is made of “happy” with a prefix “un- ” and a suffix “-ness”.

2.1.2 Morpheme

Nida 1946:1 says that morphemes are the minimal meaningful units which may constitute words or parts of words, e.g. - re, - de, - un, - ly, - ceive, - mand, -tie, -boy, and –like in the combinations receive, demand, untie, boyish, likely. The morpheme arrangements which are treated under the morphology of a language include all combinations of words into phrases and sentences are treated under the syntax. Katamba 1993:24 states that the morpheme is the smallest difference in the shape of a word that correlates with the smallest difference in word or sentence meaning or in the grammatical structure. For example, sawed, sawn, sawing and saws can all be analyzed into the morpheme. {Saw} can occur on its own as a word; it does not have to be attached to another morpheme. It is a free morpheme. However, none of the other morphemes listed just above is free. Each must be affixed attached to some other unit; each can only occur as a part of a word. Morphemes that must be attached as word parts are said to be bound morpheme. Katamba 1993:20 states that the term morpheme is used to refer to the smallest, indivisible units of semantic content or grammatical function which words are made up off. By definition, a morpheme cannot be decomposed into smaller units which are either meaningful by themselves or mark a grammatical function like singular or plural number in the noun. If we divided up the word fee Universitas Sumatera Utara 7 [fi:] which contains just one morpheme into, say, [f] and [i:] means by itself since sounds in themselves do not have meaning. Morphemes, the morphological building blocks of words, are defined as the minimal linguistics units with a lexical or a grammatical meaning. For instance, the noun buyer consists of two morphemes, buy and –er. The verbal morpheme buy is called a free or lexical morpheme, because it can occur as a word by itself, whereas –er is an affix. Based on the definition above it can be conclude that Morpheme is a meaningful of linguistics unit consisting of a word such as dog; is a word or a word element such as the –s at the end of dogs. Morpheme can be classified as either free or bound form.

1. Free Morpheme