"In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language."
The study of the construction of words and their forms.
Morpheme: A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. Understanding morphemes is critical to understanding morphology in any dialect.
Affixation: This involves adding prefixes, suffixes, or infixes to words to modify their meanings.
Inflection: This refers to the modification of a word's form to indicate tense, case, gender, number, voice, or mood.
Derivation: This involves creating new words by adding prefixes or suffixes to existing words.
Compounding: Combining two or more words to create a new word with a different meaning.
Reduplication: Repeating a word or part of a word to create a new word with a modified meaning.
Allomorphy: Variations of morphemes that are used in different contexts.
Morphological typology: The study of the different ways languages use morphology to create and modify words.
Grammatical gender: The system used in some languages to categorize nouns into masculine, feminine, or neuter based on their meaning.
Case marking: The assignment of grammatical cases to noun phrases to indicate their syntactic roles in a sentence.
Word order: How words are arranged in a sentence to convey meaning.
Phonological processes: Sound changes that occur when words are combined or inflected.
Morphological analysis: The process of breaking down and understanding the internal structure of a word.
Inflectional Morphology: Adding inflectional morphology to words changes their grammatical form, indicating things like tense, case, number, gender, and person.
Derivational Morphology: Adding derivational morphology creates new words by changing the meaning or part of speech of an existing word. Examples of derived words are: publish (verb) → publication (noun); compete (verb) → competitive (adjective).
Agglutinative Morphology: Agglutinative Morphology attaches morphemes to create longer words, with each morpheme representing a distinct grammatical or semantic meaning. Japanese and Turkish are examples of agglutinative languages.
Polysynthetic Morphology: Polysynthetic Morphology is a type of agglutinative morphology that allows for considerable flexibility in word formation, creating words that might look more like sentences. In Inuktitut (an Inuit/Aleut language), a single word might represent an entire sentence.
Fusional Morphology: Fusional Morphology combines morphemes so that two or more pieces of grammatical information are represented by a single morpheme, making it a more concise form of language.
Isolating Morphology: Isolating Morphology is a very basic type of morphology that does not use significant affixation, instead relying heavily on the order of words and particles to convey meaning.
Analytic Morphology: Analytic or "isolating" languages rely on the use of articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and quantifiers to establish meaning. In effect, the words are independent and single-word utterances are lexemes rather than morphemes.
"It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes."
"Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words."
"Morphology differs from lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary."
"In most languages, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language."
"English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the noun-bound plurality morpheme "-s"."
"Classical Chinese has very little morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes ("free" morphemes) and it relies on word order to convey meaning."
"Most words in modern Standard Chinese ["Mandarin"], however, are compounds and most roots are bound."
"The rules understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using."
"Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages."
"Studies have indicated that the presence of modification in phonology and orthography makes morphologically complex words harder to understand."
"Morphologically complex words are easier to comprehend when they include a base word."
"Polysynthetic languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed of many morphemes."
"The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes."
"The grammar of the language indicates the usage and understanding of each morpheme."
"The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology."
"Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning."
"While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax."
"Morphology also looks at [...] the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning."
"Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages."