ABSTRACT
ON
MORPHEMES AND LANGUAGE TEACHING
by
Muzaffer KATAR
CONTENTS
Pages
INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................
MORPHEME.....................................................................................................................
FREE AND BOUND MORPHEMES................................................................................
INTUITIVE NOTIONS.....................................................................................................
CONCLUSION.................................................................................................................
REFERENCES...................................................................................................................
MORPHEMES AND LANGUAGE TEACHING
INTRODUCTION
Many elements taking place in Applied Linguistics can be said to be relatively related to language teaching. However some elements in linguistics have crucial, inevitable place and importance in language teaching like grammar, morphology, structuralism.
In this paper, morphemes will be attempted to study through its significance from languge teaching perspective.
MORPHEME
When phonemes and sets of phonemes have a meaning, a message or energy they become or are called morphemes. As it is understood sounds produce some energy, then we call them morphemes or language in broad meaning.
Therefore morpheme becomes the name of the energy, in the scientific study of languge, which is produced for communication what we use language for. We, thereby, can say morphemes become the soul of the language, and a language can’t function and be communicative without the soul, the energy or the morpheme.
From what above, It is understood that teaching language for people’s communication means teaching morphemes of which base is the vocal sounds what are potentially of no importance in terms of communicative functioning. Then teaching of sounds has no communicative functioning whereas teaching of morphemized sounds and further, possible organizations of them provide communicative functioning.
Grammar and structures we teach for human communication are designed up of morphemes. (We don’t deal here with how morphemizing process realised in the circuit with these three agents: 1- Thing, feeling or action , 2-vocal sounds, 3- brain nerves, occurs and with what the inter-effective quality of these agents is.)
FREE AND BOUND MORPHEMES
Definitly we can say that morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language.
Morphemes may be free or bound. Bound morphemes are only found attached to some other morpheme. Thus “unselfish” consists of three morphemes/self/ is a free morpheme and /un-/ and /-ish/ are bound morphemes.
We, normally, teach free morphemes. Teaching bound morphemes is significant in terms of grammar system because they are used with many words, and when the students learn a bound morpheme, he can produce many notional grammar items and is helped in his communication efforts. For example:
Noun - Plural Forms Verb - Past Tense Form
boy - boys walk - walked
cat - cats talk - talked
book - books play - played
arrangement- arrangements watch - watched
Bound morphemes are to be taught under two basic categories:
Prefixes Suffixes
redo modernize
rewrite equalize
rethink centralize
We can also categorize morphemes as the parts of speech, or intuitive notions.
INTUITIVE NOTIONS
Nouns: Proper names, as well as words for humans, animals and other living things, phsyical objects, and certain abstract ideas. Examples: Mary, Edward, Fido, woman, man, dog, tree, chair, pebble, injuistice, peace.
Verbs: Words for actions, events, and relations. Examples: kiss, explode, resemble.
Adjectives: Words used to modify nouns. Examples: tall, short, fat, skinny, pleasent, obvious, untrue (as in tall person, short book, obvious idea, untrue story). When a word “modifies” another word, it provides additional relevant information. For example, in using the sentence. Short trees grow in deserts, we are not merely talking about trees in general, but rather about short trees. In this sense, we can say that the adjective shot modifies the noun trees.
Adverbs: Words used to modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs (often ending in -ly in English). Examples: quickly, easily, exceptionally, ferociously (as in reads quickly, ferociously hungry; exceptionally quickly).
Prepositions: Words for locations, direction, and instrumental relations. Examples: in, under, to, toward, from, with, by, (as in in(the room), under (the table), to (the station), toward (the mountain), from (Boston), with (the knife), (death) by (fire)).
The characteristics cited for each part of speech are in no way definitive. They merely serve as handy rules of thumb for distinguishing the traditional terms.
It is important to note that in any given language, words belonging to the same part-of-speech class share significant grammatical properties (Akmajian, Demers, Harnish, 1984: 60-61).
Morphemes are the most significant elements of language. They all carry meanings; energy. When they are used in known sets of structures, they help us create communicative functioning. As our aim is to teach people how to communicate is any one language, the significance of morphemes or morphologic studies gets clear.
When we teach morphemes, which become more communicative when they are set in structures, and what are the other significant teaching aspect of language, we get reached a great deal at our aim of language teaching. This means getting students able to use the “free morphemes” as “content and function words” alone and in structures and also together with “bound morphemes” as “affixes” (prefixes and suffixes), bound bases and contracted forms, to communicate what is our business.
Example:
We’ ve clean ed the re new ed tele fax
content contracted content suffix function prefix content suffix bound content
word form word word word base word
Here is a summarized classification of morphemes we teach by using different methods:
MORPHEMES
| |||||||||
FREE MORPHEMES
|
BOUND MORPHEMES
| ||||||||
CONTENT WORDS
(open classes)
|
FUNCTION WORDS
(closed classes)
|
AFFIXES
|
BOUND
BASES
|
CONTRACTED
FORMS
| |||||
PREFIXES
|
SUFFIXES
| ||||||||
Nouns
Verbs
Adjectives
Adverbs
|
Conjunctions (and, or)
Articles (the,a)
Demonstratives (this, that)
Prepositions (to, from, at)
Comparatives (more, less)
|
re-
un-
.
|
-s
-ize
.
.
|
-cran
.
.
|
‘ll
‘d
‘ve
.
.
| ||||
(Akmajian, Demers, Harnish, 1984: 68).
Here are some other morphologic functioning categories which must or may be taught in accordance with the level of the students. “Coining of new words”, “Compounds and Compounding”, “Word formation rules”, “Productivity and isolating the base”, “The meaning of complex words”, “Inflectional versus Derivational Morphology”, “Back-formation”, “Meaning Extensions” (Akmajian, Demers, Harnish, 1984).
CONCLUSION
Therefore, morphemes which are the basic study element of morphology are not only very important for communication and language, but also for language teaching. After this study, it is understood that morphemes and morphologic study are inevitable for language and it is realized that communication means using morphemes alone or in sets, and that language teaching, in some way, is teaching of morphemes of different categories.
REFERENCES:
Akmajian, Adrian, Demers, R., Harnish, R. LINGUISTICS: An Introduction To Language and Communication. London: The MIT Press, 1984.
Broughton, Geoffrey, Brumfit, C., Flavell, R., Hill, P., Pincas, A. Teaching English As Foreign Language. New York: T.J. Press, 1993.
Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. (Third Edition). Padstow: T.J. Press, 1995.
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