Morphology | Language glossary

written by:  Krystof-Sandor Harfst

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Morphology

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and how they are formed. It is a branch of linguistics that focuses on the ways in which words are put together using a set of rules or principles, and how the internal structure of words can change to create new words or to convey different meanings.


In most languages, words are composed of smaller units called morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units of language. These morphemes can be prefixes, suffixes, or root words, and they can be combined in various ways to create new words. For example, the English word "unbreakable" is made up of three morphemes: "un-", "break", and "-able". The first morpheme, "un-", is a prefix that means "not", the second, "break", is the root word, and the third, "-able", is a suffix that means "able to be". Together, these three morphemes combine to form the new word "unbreakable", which means "not able to be broken".


Morphologists study the rules and principles that govern the formation of words in a language, and they also look at the ways in which words can be modified or altered to create new meanings. This can include the use of inflection, which is the process of adding inflectional morphemes to a word to indicate grammatical information such as tense, case, or person. For example, the English word "run" can be changed to "ran" by adding the inflectional morpheme "-ed", which indicates past tense.



Overall, morphology is an important field of study in linguistics that helps us to understand how words are formed and used in language, and how we can use these principles to create new words and convey meaning.


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