2.2 How Important of Morphology in the Vocabulary-Building Process? Without Memorisation

People from Asia have misconceptions about native English-speakers in the West. When they experience the diversity of culture there, they grumble about the cultural shock of productivity deficiency, misaligned expectation, and impoliteness upon social orientation. Asian parent would call the retreat as lazy as trash. In fact, Asian people should level down their self-esteem to look at the working philosophy behind the scenes. Perhaps leisure in the workplace means less stress and anxiety, and at the same time, workers can concentrate precisely on quality and standard provided. The same applies to everyone in high school and university. Some research pointed out that about one-fourth of the high school graduates in the US had little ability to read and write. But hang on a minute, do we need that skill funnelled through memorisation and strict rules to tell everyone that we are speaking good English? No, and in fact we do not need to.

When you leave high school and move towards the undergraduate level, you are more likely to advance in vocabulary-building. My readers would be happy if I told everyone in advance here. We do not need to know the spelling of every word, especially for the difficult one, by heart. But we must know the composition of the word itself in the system of Morphology. Morphology is the branch of linguistics concerning the structural words formation and how they are formed. Morphemes are the building blocks. They come in various types, including roots, prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. If you put it onto a mathematical form, you have the following:

Morphology of a word = prefix + root word/ base word + suffix

I use embarrassed as an illustration from the previous chapter, we can break it into three parts: [em-barrass-ed]. [em-] shows the act moving internally, [-barrass-] is the root came from Portuguese then Spanish then France in the early 1600s, and [-ed] foots into the adjective form by being passive in past tense. In most cases, English vocabulary has their historical origin caused by the etymology process through our general usage. Let’s look at another example, the word 'untreatable' consists of three morphemes, again, as usual: 'un-' (a prefix denoting negation), 'treat' (a root word meaning to hold something can be fixed), and '-able' (a suffix indicating ability). A root morpheme is the primary lexical unit; it carries the most significant aspect of semantic content, and it cannot be broken down into smaller parts. How about another example: 'friend' is a root morpheme because only prefix can be applied. Prefixes are those added to the beginning of the root to change the projection of meaning, such as 'pre-' in 'preview' or 'dis-' in 'disagree'.

Here’s are some common examples of Prefix and Suffix respectively:

Prefix:

Un- (not), Re- (again), Dis- (opposite), Pre- (before), Mis- (wrongly), Non- (not), Sub- (under), Inter- (conjunct)

Suffix:

-ly (characteristic of), -less (without), -ful (full of), -er / -or (a dedicated person), -ment (action or process) -able / -ible (capable of), -ish (having the quality of) -ion / -tion (state of being)

Like in the previous example, suffixes are added to the end of words to change their grammatical function. Suffixes are in a mirroring position of the prefixes. For example, '-ed' in 'embarrassed' to indicate past tense, or '-ness' in 'happiness' to form a noun. Now you know vocabulary can be self-innovated. Over time, we create side categories such as slang, colloquial, and informal language into our living context. One predominant example is the creation of Infixes in the system. Infixes are morphemes inserted within a word. An example can be found in some informal versions of English, like 'my-bloody-self'. Strange, isn’t it? Yet the overall morphology contributes to the composition of the word itself. And behind it, it provided deeper insights into the structure and formation of language based on its deviated background.

Another key identifier is root word of the vocabulary within itself. Root word is a word that cannot be stood alone unlike the main structure. By taking account of English’s chronical revolutions, some vocabularies were derived from other languages and borrowed that into the language of English. You may come across words in some circumstances that were partly taken from Greek, Latin, French through Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon, and the Vikings. Please see the following:

Examples in Latin Root

Root Meaning Examples

Bene good Benefit, benevolent, benefactor

Cred to believe Credible, incredulous, credit

Dict to say Dictate, prediction, dictionary

Fract to break Fracture, fraction, fragment

Ject to throw Projection, reject, inject

Vis / Vid to see Vision, invisible, video

 Examples in Greek Root

Root Meaning Examples

Hydr water Hydrate, dehydrate, hydrogen

Chron time Chronic, synchronize, chronology

Phon sound Telephone, symphony, microphone

Graph to write Autography, photograph, paragraph

Astro star Astronomy, astronaut, astrophysics

Path feel / disease Empathy, antipathy, apathy

Source:https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/spelling-and-word-study/articles/root-words-suffixes-and-prefixes, https://www.scribbr.com/language-rules/root-words/

As opposed to root words, base words have a stand along ability to be the meaning itself. It serves as a component of the part of speech independently, with or without any prefix and suffix. Those are words that you may frequently use but without further interrogation such as ‘help’, ‘able’, ‘can’, ‘get’, ‘friend’, ‘care’ etc. The ability to stand alone increases the probability of identifying the meaning’s directory of backward, forward, inner, or outward.

Vocabulary builders can therefore take advantage to develop their vocabulary-cracking knowledge. For example, in the college entrance exam of SAT, GRE, TOFEL, GED, test takers can reduce their effort of memorizing the lists and use the above morphology technique to depict the vocabulary’s meaning from the word’s structure itself. From there, you are almost fit into the answer by assessing the statement’s logic. Now back to the very original question: should you memorize every single word in the dictionary, proofing your fluency and literacy in English? No, and need not to. Morphology gives up a convenient system to decompose and then compose the word formation. Other than Morphology, Syntax is the governing principles that set out the sentence structure and grammar, and semantics. It is a field of study upon the meaning of a language but ignored by English teachers and learners in the world.  

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