Strand 2/Morphology - Part 1: Nonsense and Made-Up Words, Focusing on Nouns

You could start with Lesson 1, the nonsense sentence activity from Strand 1, where the goal is to understand our unconscious knowledge of parts of speech and our use of morphology and syntax in accessing that knowledge. We can figure out a lot about words, categories, and meanings by using morphology, syntax, and even phonology. (The phonology focus will be unique to this strand. We’ll examine, for example, some sound changes and correspondences that can shed light on relationships between words of Latin origin and those of Anglo-Saxon origin.) There’s a great version of this lesson, called “Morphology Games: What making up words reveals,” posted by Christina Galeano on Teachling here.


We can also see how we use morphological knowledge by looking at made-up but “real” words, words you likely have never heard before: unsluglike. How do you know what that means? Because you know the meanings of the parts, the morphemes. What does un- mean? What does the suffix -like mean? The strategy here and in figuring out morpheme meaning in general will be to think of other words that also have that same piece. So, words like unhappy, uninteresting or childlike. (Un- is actually trickier than most morphemes because there are two uns with different meanings that attach to different parts of speech – the un- of unhappy which means ‘not’ and attaches to adjectives, and the un- of untie that means ‘reverse the action’ and attaches to verbs. So that could be a separate lesson or you could choose a word that’s easier to analyze than unsluglike.)