3 51 J.B. Metzler © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature, 2020 B. Kortmann, English Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05678-8_3 3 Morphology: On the structure and formation of words Morphology is concerned with the internal structure of words and with the various processes which allow us to constantly expand the vocabu- lary of a language. Morpheme: The basic morphological unit is not the word, but the morpheme (Greek morphé = shape, form), the smallest meaning-bearing unit of language. Thus, the word singers contains three morphemes: sing, -er, and -s. Each of these three morphemes adds to the overall meaning of singers: the verb sing makes the central contribution, while -er on its own means no more than ‘someone who VERBs’, and the -s merely gives grammatical information, namely plural. This simple example shows that we can distinguish between different types of morphemes. It is a wide- spread convention in linguistics to put morphemes in curly brackets, e.g. {SING}, {Plural}; however, most of the time this convention can be dis- pensed with without a loss of clarity. Morphemes vs (allo-)morphs: On the level of morphology, morphemes are the exact counterpart to phonemes on the level of phonology. Just like phonemes, morphemes are abstract units which can be realized by more than one form. Just think of the plural morpheme in word forms like kids, kits, and kisses, where it is realized as /-z/, /-s/, and /-ɪz/ respectively. These concrete realizations of morphemes are called morphs, and in anal- ogy to the allophones of a phoneme we speak of the allomorphs of a morpheme (more on this in section 3.2). Word – word form – lexeme: The example singers also serves to show how important it is to deal with the term word in a more differentiated way. Is singers a different word from singer? No, singers is merely a differ- ent form, a so-called word form, of the noun singer. Singer itself, on the other hand, is not merely a word form of sing, but a different, new word, which has been formed by affixation of -er to the verb. In this case, we speak of a new lexeme with a new dictionary entry which has been cre- ated by a specific derivational process. And what about sing itself: is it a word, a lexeme, or a morpheme? Three times yes: sing is a morpheme that can occur on its own (a so- called free morpheme); it denotes something in the extra-linguistic, i. e. real world, in this case a particular action or activity; it has an entry in the dictionary, and thus qualifies as a lexeme; and it is a word, if we adopt the prototypical use of word in everyday language. The example sing fur- thermore shows that words do not necessarily have an internal structure: it merely consists of one morpheme. The fact that sing, besides being defnitions morphological structure ≠ syllable structure 3.1 Types of morphemes 3.2 Morphophonemics: Interface of morphology and phonology 3.3 Word formation processes