Morphology is the study of how words are structured, how words are put together from smaller parts, and how languages build words and indicate grammatical relationships between wor... Morphology is the study of how words are structured, how words are put together from smaller parts, and how languages build words and indicate grammatical relationships between words. A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has a meaning or grammatical function. The meaning of words is conceptual; the meaning of morphemes, however, is very specific, more abstract and wider. Some morphemes like boy, desire, gentle, man, in, of, and the may constitute words by themselves. These are free morphemes. Other morphemes like –ish, -ness, -ly, dis-, trans-, and –un are never words but are always parts of words. These affixes are bound morphemes. A bound morpheme like un- and bi- attaches to the beginning of a word is a prefix. A bound morpheme like -er and -ing attaches to the end of a word is a suffix. Free morphemes can be base words, compound words, or function words. Bound morphemes can be prefixes, infixes, circumfixes, suffixes, or roots. The general term for prefixes, infixes, circumfixes, and suffixes is affix, so bound morphemes are also referred to as affixes. The average English speakers know about 20,000-40,000 English words. More English words begin with the letter s- than any other letter of the alphabet. When trying to find out the history of such words as sandwich and bigwig, we look for their etymology. Some languages like Tagalog have infixes, morphemes that are inserted into other morphemes. Some languages like German and Chickasaw have circumfixes, morphemes that are attached to a base morpheme both initially and finally. These are sometimes called discontinuous morphemes. In Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, nouns and verbs are built on a foundation of three consonants. The bound roots underlined such as deceive and lukewarm have no meaning in isolation but acquire meaning only in combination with other specific morphemes. Morphemes that change the meaning or grammatical class of a word they attach to are called derivational morphemes. Derivational morphemes generally are selective about what they’ll combine with. English uses derivational morphemes to create more words than would exist with only free morphemes. In English the derivational morphemes are either prefixes or suffixes, but the inflectional morphemes are all suffixes. Back-formation is creation of a new word by removing an affix from an old word, e.g., donate from donation; or by removing what is mistakenly considered an affix, e.g., edit from editor. Languages have some smaller classes of words that are irregular, or suppletive, because they mark the same morphological distinction by another of these processes. In English, the rightmost word in a compound is the head of the compound, and it determines its broad meaning and grammatical category. Compounding is a process that forms new words from two or more independent words. It is a common and frequent process for enlarging the vocabulary of all languages. The meaning of a compound is not always the sum of the meaning of its parts. Many compounds are idiomatic. After we learn both the sounds and their related meaning, we know the word. It becomes an entry in our mental lexicon. In English, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are the content words. Content words are sometimes called the open class words because we can and regularly do add new words to these classes. Some brain-damaged patients and people with specific language impairments have greater difficulty in using, understanding, or reading function words than they do with content words. Read more