Morphology of Language

Definition and Scope

• Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and how they are formed from smaller units such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
• It examines the patterns of formation and variation of words in a language.

Key Concepts

• Morpheme: The smallest unit of language that carries meaning.
  • Free morphemes: Standalone words (e.g., dog, run)
  • Bound morphemes: Affixes (prefixes, suffixes, infixes) that attach to roots (e.g., un-, -able, -ed)
• Root: The core of a word that carries the main meaning.
• Stem: A root with any affixes (e.g., unbreak-able)
• Allomorph: A variant of a morpheme with a different pronunciation or spelling (e.g., -s and -es plural forms)

Types of Morphological Processes

• Derivation: Creating new words by adding affixes to roots (e.g., happy → unhappy)
• Compounding: Creating new words by combining two or more roots (e.g., black + board → blackboard)
• Blending: Creating new words by combining parts of two or more roots (e.g., smog ← smoke + fog)
• Inflection: Modifying words to indicate grammatical information (e.g., run → running)

Morphological Analysis

• Segmentation: Breaking down words into their constituent morphemes (e.g., unhappy → un- + happy)
• Identification: Determining the function of each morpheme in a word

Importance of Morphology

• Understanding word formation and structure is essential for language acquisition, language teaching, and linguistic research.
• Morphology has applications in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and language technology.