13 Concepts from Morphology that every KPSC HSA English Aspirant Should Know! (Based on Previous Question Paper)

Concepts from Morphology

1. A morpheme is the minimal meaningful unit in a language. For example the word 'human', 'legal' 'mortal' are morphemes. 

2. Two types of Morphemes.Morphemes are categorized into two types: lexical (or content) and functional (or grammatical). 

3. Lexical morphemes are morphemes that carry the main semantic meaning of a word. They are typically nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, forming the core vocabulary of a language. Examples: Nouns: cat, house, tree, joy. Verbs: run, eat, sleep, think Adjectives: happy, blue, tall, sad

4. Functional morphemes are words that have little meaning on their own but serve to express grammatical relationships between other words in a sentence. They include prepositions (e.g., on, of), articles (e.g., the, a), conjunctions (e.g., and), and pronouns (e.g., them).

5. Allomorphs are the phonetically variant forms of a morpheme. Example- 1. The plural morpheme -s/-es is phonologically realized in words cats, dogs and watches as /s/, /z/ and /iz/ respectively. The same morpheme has different phonetic representation, hence they are the allomorphs of 'plural morpheme -s'

6. Clitic.  A clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically a word but cannot stand on its own phonologically and attaches to another word. An example is the possessive 's in "John's book."

7. A grapheme is the smallest unit in a writing system (a letter or a combination of letters) that represents a single sound (phoneme). 

8. A digraph is a specific type of grapheme where two letters are used together to represent one sound, such as 'sh' in "ship" or 'ph' in "photo".

9. Back-formation Back-formation is a word-formation process where a new word (typically a verb) is created by removing an affix from an existing word (usually a noun). For example, the verb "televise" was created from the noun "television" by removing what was mistakenly thought to be a suffix.

10.  Hyponymy. Hyponymy is a term in linguistics that describes a specific kind of semantic relationship between words where the meaning of a more specific word (the hyponym) is included within the meaning of a more general word (the hypernym). For example the word for a specific flower 'rose' (hyponym) is included in the general word flower (hypernym).

11.  Semantics. Semantics is the the study of meanings in a language

12. Polysemy. Polysemy is defined as “one form having multiple meanings which are all related by extension. Polysemous words will have a single entry with a numbered list of the different meanings of the word. Examples: the word Head may mean human head, department head, a place of entry in accounting.

13. Homonym. Homonyms are two or more different lexemes (a meaningful word) which have the same form but are unrelated in meaning.