Blurb:

In this chapter we extend our presentation of the phonology of English words from free, basic, monomorphemic words to a consideration of words with complex structures, i.e. with affixes and compound elements. Linguists in the SFL tradition have been preoccupied with the grammar of the clause and have not shown a great deal of interest in morphology; it barely gets a mention beyond an acknowledgement that morphemes exist as the very smallest unit in the grammatical hierarchy (see Halliday et al. 1964: 51; Berry 1975: 91; Young 1980: 13–14; Halliday 1984: 20; Thompson 1996: 20; Downing and Locke 2004: 10, 13; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 9; Fontaine 2013: 35). For this reason, we must seek support from elsewhere, from other traditions including psycholinguists such as Aitchison (2003). We will show how the principal features of Systemic Phonology apply to complex, polymorphemic words as well as simple, free forms.

Affixes, i.e. bound morphemes, provide specifications of details of a grammatical nature to the meanings of the words and stems that they are attached to. Likewise, compound elements provide a more specific focus of the meaning of the words and stems they are attached to.

Just as the primary function of phonology is to provide a (more or less) unique spoken form of all the units that make up a language’s lexicogrammar, this applies to affixes and compound structures too. We noted that typically words in citation form are represented in phonology as feet, which display a prosodic shape and a structure of syllables, which themselves have a structure of phonemes. In the case of compound words in citation form, there are two elements, each represented by a foot, but one subordinate to the other as an ‘extension’; however, in a small number of cases the second element is simply an unstressed syllable. In the case of affixes, the matching phonology is the syllable and phoneme.

We will deal with the bound morphemes of affixes first, where, traditionally, a division has been established between affixes that designate either inflections or derivations. Inflections indicate the addition of a grammatical category to a word that does not alter their word class designation, whereas derivations indicate a change of word class or an additional category of meaning. We consider inflections first, and then derivations, with a brief interlude on numerals that share some features of both. And then, finally, compounds.