ECON 3300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Reduplication, Muhammadiyah, Sunan Ampel
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CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
2.1. Review of Related Theories
This chapter presents the review of some related theories concerning
morphology, definition of errors, the significance of errors, error analysis,
procedures of error analysis, types of English morphological inflection, and
causes of errors.
2.1.1. Morphology
Morphology is the branch of linguistics that is concerned with the
relation between meaning and form, within words and between words.1
The word morphology consists of two morphemes, morph + ology. The
suffix –ology means “science of” or “branch of knowledge concerning.”
Thus, the meaning of morphology is “the science of word forms.”
Morphology is part of our grammatical knowledge of a language.2 So
that’s why, morphology can be used in two ways: it refers to a sub
discipline of linguistics, but it may also be used to refer to a part of the
grammar of a language that contains the rules for inflection and word
1Ralph Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton, An Introduction to Language and Linguistics, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 59.
2Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, An Introduction to Language (Eighth edition),
(Australia: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007), 77.
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formation, that is the word grammar.3 Morphology and syntax is essential
to successful communication whether in writing or in speech.4
One of the most important functions of morphology is to distinguish
the roles played by various participants in an event; we could not interpret
language without this information.5 Morphology identifies and classifies
the morphemes and describes the types of combinations that build words
in the language.6
2.1.1.1. Morpheme
The study of morpheme is an interesting endeavour in the
sense that it is an attempt to study how humans come about word
usage which is the foundation of any human language. It is also
very interesting to note that morphemes form the foundation of
words even though they themselves do not tell us meaning, but
they have a way of contributing to meaning when they are used in
specific contexts. This is because they are made up of phonemes
which in turn combine to give words.7 The morpheme is necessary
to make the sentence grammatically correct.8 So that’s why, it is
3Geert Booij, The Grammar of Words, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23.
4Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching (Third Edition), (New York: Longman,
2006), 13.
5Ralph Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton, An Introduction to Language … 61.
6Robert Lado, Language Teaching: A Scientific Approach, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 13.
7Dr. Harrison Adeniyi, English Morphology, (Nigeria: National Open University of Nigeria, 2010), 8.
8Patsy M. Lightbown, Nina Spada, How Language are Learned: Third Edition, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 83.
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important to learn morphemes in order that we can master English
skill.
Morpheme comes from the Greek, “morphe” that is form or
shape. Morphemes can be thought of as minimal units of
morphology.9 A Morpheme is the smallest unit of a language
system which has meaning.10 For example: the word reopened in
the sentence the police reopened the investigation consists of three
morphemes. They are open, re-, and –ed.
There are two types of morphemes:
1. Free Morphemes
Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand on their
own as a word because they carry meaning.11 It means that a
free morpheme can occur independently and have meaning.
The examples of free morphemes are cat, text, book, quick,
school, boy, girl, teach, examine, church, mosque, etc.
Some linguists refer to the free morphemes as full
morphemes. Most free morphemes are content or lexical
words.12 There are two categories of free morphemes:
9Andrew Carstairs McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure,
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University press, 2002), 16.
10Sharon Wynne, Texes English as a Second Language (ESL), (Boston: XAMonline, Inc., 2010), 4.
11Andrew Carstairs McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology… 143.
12Dr. Harrison Adeniyi, English Morphology… 9.
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