LANE 333

1. LANE 333 -
MORPHOLOGY
2012 – Term 1
Immediate
Constituents 5
By: http://SBANJAR.kau.edu.sa/
Dr. Shadia Y. Banjar http://wwwdrshadiabanjar.blogspot.com
1 Dr. Shadia Yousef Banjar

2. • A word of one morpheme, like blaze,
has, of course, just one unitary part.
• A word of two morphemes, like
cheerful, is obviously composed of two
parts, with the division between them:
cheer ful
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3. • a word of three or more morphemes is not made up of a string of individual
parts;
• it is built with a hierarchy of twosomes.
•As an illustration lets us examine the formation of gentlemanly, a word of
three morphemes.
• gentle and man were put together to give gentleman.
• we see that the meaning of gentleman is a composite of these of its two
constituents.
•Now we add –ly, meaning “like”, and get gentlemanly, like a gentleman.
• Now when we analyze a word we show this process but in reverse.
•We usually divide a word into two parts of which it seems to have been
composed.
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4. • words are formed in steps, they have a
special type of structure characterized as
hierarchical.
•This hierarchical structure can be
schematically represented by means of tree
diagrams that indicate the steps involved
the formation of the word.
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5. Immediate Constituents
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6. •In doing word diagrams like those above to show
layers of structure, we make successive divisions into
two parts,
• each of which is called an Immediate Constituent,
abbreviated as IC.
•The process is continued until all component
morphemes of a word, the ultimate constituents, have
been isolated.
IC
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8. Here are three recommendations on IC division:
1. If a word ends in an inflectional suffix, the first
cut is between the suffix and the rest of the
word.
2. One of the ICs should be, if possible, a free
form.
3. The meaning of the ICs should be related to
meaning of the word.
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9. • some words are ambiguous in that they have more than
one meaning.
• When we examine their internal structure, we find out that
they may be analyzed in more than one way.
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10. X
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