Morphology is concerned with word formation.

The unique words in these pictures

illustrate the morphological process. How were whole words and/or word parts
combined to convey meaning?

(Watch this marvelous little video on word formation or visit Popular Linguistics
Online where Corrine McCarthy (George Mason University) neatly summarizes how words
are formed through morphological processes.)

To generate words, we put whole words and word parts together in new
configurations, new concatenations. Neologisms are coined daily; the English
language is growing fast (read more). McFedries at wordspy.com tracks neologisms
that have been published in print, including post-Potter and spillionaire. With
apparent ease and enjoyment humans create words in living languages, including sign
language. This ability manifests itself at an early age: When making rock candy, my
friend's daughter asked, "Daddy, is the candy rockening yet?"

Morphology refers to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch
of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are
formed" (Aronoff & Fudeman, 2005, p. 2). A morpheme is an indivisible unit of
meaning--a prefix, suffix, root, or base. English contains words with morphemes
seamlessly joined together, as in dis- + taste + -ful or sym- + phon + -ic.
However, many words do not fit into this structure--and that's worth teaching, too.
The English language is flexible, tolerant, expansive. The Greek root morph
denotes 'structure, form' and a morphologist is interested in how all words are
formed and understood, including words with variant, irregular morphemes (teach-
taught, child-children), acronyms like NASA and initialisms (abbreviations) like
UFO. Morphological processes are also involved when we create compound words like
sunshine and son-in-law, and when we smash words together into linguistic blends
(aka portmanteau words) like Texarkana, skort, smog, FedEx and zootique, the gift
shop at the zoo in Central Park.

We eventually become comfortable with a range of morphological word types,

including base words (e.g., lunch), inflections (lunches), compounds (lunchbox,
lunch table), derivations (luncheonette) and blends (brunch). Because we look
inside words for recognizable chunks, because we are aware of and even
knowledgeable about prefixes, suffixes, bases and roots, we can grasp
morphologically complex derivations, including Lunchables (eek!), epigrammatic and
exothermic reaction. The ability to make sense of these words appears to be due in
large part to the construct we call MA or morphological awareness (Carlisle, 2003;
Kuo & Anderson, 2006).

Morphological awareness has been defined as, The ability to reflect upon and
manipulate morphemes and employ word formation rules in ones language (Kuo &
Anderson, 2006, p. 161). It is conceptualized as one aspect of word consciousness
(Graves, 2006), one aspect of metalinguistic awareness (Nagy, 2007) and thought to
involve metacognition (McBride-Chang et al., 2005; Nagy, 2007). It is also thought
that, in the mental lexicon, morphologically related words like sweet, sweeten,
sweetener, sweetly, sweetness coactivate, priming each other, nudging each other if
you will. Thus, in general, we recognize words faster and more accurately if they
are reinforced by a large morphological family and/or if they are high-frequency
words (Baayen, 2007; Carlisle & Katz, 2006; Dorfman, 1998; Nagy et al., 1989).
(we LIKE wordplay)
In kindergarten we read many simple words that have only one morpheme, as in yellow
and song but by fourth grade we must come to grips with complex words like
biological and unpredictability. We analyze the word's constituent parts and
compare it to a word we already know. We seek similarity in form and meaning by
looking within and across words. Thus, it seems that MA develops over time,
contributing more to word knowledge as students are increasingly exposed to
morphologically complex derivations, but here's the catch: With limited MA,
vocabulary growth is significantly hindered (Anglin, 1993; Carlisle, 2000, 2003;
McBride-Chang, Wagner, Muse, Chow, & Shu, 2005; Nagy, 2007).

Implications for teaching and learning:

If we are not looking inside words to find chunks of meaning then we need to be
taught how to do so. Eventually, with instruction, we should be able to offer up a
hypothesis for the structure and meaning of each word pictured on this page. More
than that, we should be able to coin words more complex than any pictured here.
Begin in primary grades with a simple morphological family like dodging, dodged,
dodge, dodge ball, dodger. I suggest that by second grade, children need to
understand how compound words convey meaning and in order to read fourth grade
texts they must have a sense of more complex words containing prefixes and suffixes
surrounding a root or base, as described by Marcia Henry. Instruction should be
more effective if lessons coordinate context, semantics, morphology, orthography
and phonology because that appears to be what the mind does to make sense of
written language (Nagy, Berninger, Abbott, Vaughan, & Vermeulen, 2003). The mind
also considers syntax, including the morphosyntactic properties of words (e.g.,
words that end with the suffix -ness tend to be abstract nouns--concepts, feelings,
ideas--as in happiness, sadness, peacefulness, thankfulness). In fact, Maryanne
Wolf (2007) uses the acronym POSSM to convey the five language components we must
coordinate when teaching words. POSSM stands for phonology/phonics, orthography,
semantics, syntax, morphology. For more information on syntax and morphology, see
Suffixes. Also, if teaching English-language learners, see Carolyn Eddy's post on
how we can help Spanish-dominant speakers learn the syntactic properties of English
words.

The study of morphology is for everyone. All students, including those with reading
disabilities, can gain from such integrated instruction. The motivational and
cognitive benefits for at-risk readers are outlined by Alexis Filippini. This
applies to young children as well as adolescents (see sorting ideas and a
children's book for learning the suffix -ish as in reddish, and see post by Pete
Bowers). Learning a bit about morphology has been found to benefit adults, too:
Professor Tom Bellomo has shown that teaching morphology to ELLs in college English
promoted vocabulary growth for students of Spanish and also, to less extent, of
Asian language background..

Because the development of a large vocabulary appears to rely on the development of

morphological awareness, this topic is frequently broached in this blog. However,
it should be noted that morphological awareness also facilitates spelling
(encoding), reading (decoding) and comprehension, as mentioned in Metalingiustic
Awareness, Comprehension, and the Common Core State Standards. Reasoning
morphologically is cognitively engaging, as discussed by Shane Templeton in More
Than the Sum of their Parts.

Limitations: Morphemic analysis helps us understand a great many words but

indivisible morphological elements such as affixes and roots cannot account for all
the words and phrases in one's mental lexicon (Aronoff & Fudeman, 2005). Many words
appear to be swallowed whole, including base words like stem, umbrella and violin
and derivations like happy - hapless - haphazard. The number of blended words has
increased significantly, even explosively, in the last century, as many of the
advertisements on this page illustrate, and English continues to adopt loan words
from other languages. Therefore, we must also master the strategy of analogy, learn
how to use context clues and become familiar with the dictionary. For example, by
examining the context for baby-lag in the Word Spy clip below, and by drawing an
analogy to something with a similar word structure that we already know -- jet lag
-- we can infer the meaning of baby-lag. However, simply knowing the meaning of
baby and the meaning of lag will not help us very much. Morphological processing
works best with context.

A related limitation is that morphemic analysis does not apply equally to every
word. Words that belong to a large family are more readily accessed than, for
example, squirrel, sabotage and smuggle. We want to learn the more generative base
words, roots, and affixes. For example, if we know the word stable we should be
able to use morphological problem-solving and context clues to decipher unstable,
stability, instability, stabilize, stabilizationpossibly even establish,
establishment andyou guessed itantidisestablishmentarianism.

References
--Aronoff, M., & Fudeman, K. (2005). What is morphology? Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing.
--Anglin, J. M. (1993). Vocabulary development: A morphological analysis.
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 58(10)[238], v-165.
--Baayen, R.H. (2007). Storage and computation in the mental lexicon. In G. Jarema
and G. Libben (Eds.), The Mental Lexicon: Core Perspectives, Elsevier, 81-104.
--Bowers, P. N., Kirby, J. R., & S. H. Deacon. (2010). The effects of morphological
instruction on literacy skills: A systematic review of the literature. Review of
Educational Research, 80.
--Carlisle, J. F. (2003). Morphology matters in learning to read: A commentary.
Reading Psychology, 24(3), 291-322.
--Carlisle, J.F., & Katz, L. (2006). Effects of word and morpheme familiarity on
reading of derived words. Reading and Writing, 19(7), 669-693.
--Dorfman, J. (1998). Further evidence for sublexical components in implicit memory
for novel words. Memory and Cognition, 26(6), 1157-1172.
--Graves, M.F. (2006). The vocabulary book: Learning and instruction. New York:
Teachers College Press.
--Kuo, L-J., & Anderson, R. C. (2006). Morphological awareness and learning to
read: A cross-language perspective. Educational Psychologist, 41-3, 161-180.
--McBride-Chang, C., Wagner, R.K., Muse, A., Chow, B.W., & Shu, H. (2005). The role
of morphological awareness in children's vocabulary acquisition in English. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 26, 415-435.
--Nagy, W.E. (2007). Metalinguistic awareness and the vocabulary-comprehension
connection. In R.K. Wagner, A.E Muse, & K.R. Tannenbaum (Eds.), Vocabulary
acquisition: Implications for reading comprehension (pp. 52-77). New York: Guilford
Press.
--Nagy, W.E., Anderson, R., Schommer, M., Scott, J.A. and Stallman, A. (1989)
Morphological families in the internal lexicon. Reading Research Quarterly 24, 3:
263-282.
--Nagy, W.E., Berninger, V., Abbott, R., Vaughan, K., & Vermeulen, K. (2003).
Relationship of morphology and other language skills to literacy skills in at-risk
second grade readers and at-risk fourth grade writers. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 95, 730-742.
--Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading
brain. New York: Harper.