Download Reflection paper about Morphology in Linguistics and more Papers English Language in PDF only on Docsity! Mid-term (reflection papers) Name: Tran Thi My Linh Student code: 1957011143 Class: 19CLCO5 Answer Introduction to English is a course in which I have the opportunity to have an overview about the origin and critical issue of language, along with the understanding of key concepts in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. Through the lessons I have learned from my lecturer and the presentations from my classmates, the topic that I am interested in the most is morphology - “the study of forms”’. Throughout the previous three topics, I have acquired the knowledge about the word formation and the unit called “word” as an easy form to identify. One thing I like about morphology that it helps me identify the word formation more exactly. Before learning about morphology, I used to identify a word by the space between two letters. If the space between two letters is bigger, it separates two words. However, this assumption can lead to problems in describing language as well as individual linguistics forms. From an example I have read in chapter 6 (“The Study of Language” by George Yule), in Swahili — a language spoken in East Africa, there is a form called “nitakupenda”, which would be interpreted as “I will love you” in English. It seems to be a single word maybe because it has the elements making us to think it is a separate word — there is no space between letters. Following is the rough correspondence of this word: Ni ta ku penda IT will you love From the example above, I can see that a “word” in Swahili seems to be different from an English “word” I have known before, as it contains the elements that can make up a whole message in English. Another example is in Vietnamese, the word “catfish” can be separated into two words “ca tré”. Regardless of these variations, morphology is a part of grammar in every language. Therefore, using these elements, known as “morphemes’’,, to study the linguistics forms of different languages may be better than just focusing on the “words”, in either English or other languages. Another thing that impresses me is the simple and concise term “morphology”, which is a makeup of morph- meaning “shape, form’, and -o/ogy meaning “the study of something”. Besides, there is no denying that morpheme is an interesting part of morphology. The classification of morphemes consists of two main types: free morphemes and bound morphemes. Free morphemes include lexical and functional morphemes, while bound morphemes include derivational and inflectional morphemes. Learning about morphemes help me change the word form of a word in a language that I have never learned before just by following some specific rules of that language. For example, in Tagalog, the word “lakad” (walk) is changed into “lalakad” (will walk) by adding a repetition of the first syllable “la”. Obviously I am almost satisfied with all the information about morphology that I have acquired. However, if I had to say what I dislike the most or what confuses me about morphology, it would be some problems in morphological description. We all know that the derivational morpheme -al can be added to the word “nation” (noun) to turn it into “national” (adjective). However, the
