Language and Culture
Anthropology 354
Course
Outline
Unit 4
Morphology and Writing Systems
Overview
Anyone who has ever committed a pun or told a “knock, knock” joke has been playing with morphemes. Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning in a language, and morphology is the study of the patterns that those units form. While words are “natural units” in literate societies, they are not the smallest physical or meaningful units. Words can be subdivided into formal units or morphs.
Objectives
After completing this unit, you should be able to
- define the following terms
- lexicon, Lexicon
- morpheme (bound and free)
- affix
- prefix
- suffix
- infix
- morphological rule
- paradigm
- allomorph
- morphophonemic rule
- agglutinating languages
- analytic languages
- synthetic languages
- polysynthetic languages
- pictograms
- ideograms
- logograms
- hieroglyphics
- alphabetic writing systems
- differentiate between morphemes and words.
- outline the inflectional and the derivational processes.
- describe how a fieldworker obtains a working lexicon.
- describe the evolution of writing systems.
- identify and describe three different types of writing systems and the languages in which they are used.
- discuss the ways in which writing is useful to human societies and the limitation written records have for linguistic analysis.
- solve linguistic problems using the following techniques:
- a morphemic analysis applied to English and other languages; and
- an analysis of writing systems using pictograms, the rebus principle, and syllabics.
