Morphophonemic analyses of the textualities in "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer and "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe

This paper argues that the structural linearity of language is revealed in General American English morphemes and phonemes of “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. It analyzes the phonological and morphological structures in select textualities. It focuses on phonemic structures in terms of segmental and suprasegmental phonemes and morphemic structures according to lexical and grammatical free morphemes, inflectional and derivational bound morphemes, and word-formation processes. Findings reveal that for segmental phonemic analysis in terms of vowel sounds, the center vowel [ə] or schwa is the most dominant vowel phoneme in both poems against diphthong [oy], which never appeared in both textualities. Meanwhile, in terms of consonant sounds, nasal [n] dominated the poems. Fricative [zh], affricate [ch], and syllabic consonants [‘l] and [‘n] are absent in the textualities of these poems. Both poems also show suprasegmental features in their textualities as they display stress patterns, pitch level combination of 2-3-2/2-3-1, sustained or level 1 juncture, and non-final intonation level 2-3-2 patterns. Both poems contain 71 lexical morphemes or content words and 43 grammatical morphemes or function words on their textualities. They contain eight (8) inflectional morphemes, such as suffix -s, and 5 derivational morphemes, such as suffix -ly and -y, that cause the change in the meaning of the words. Word formation processes of the two poems reveal more folk etymology and derivational processes. Therefore, the linearity of phonemes and morphemes are revealed in the linguistic structure of the textualities of “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. It is recommended that these poems are to be used as learning materials, specifically in phonology and morphology lessons.