The study of the morphology of the word

In linguistics, morphology (^[1]) is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.^[2][3] It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word’s pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words,^[4] and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language’s vocabulary.^[5]

While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme «-s», only found bound to noun phrases. Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these relations from their innate knowledge of English’s rules of word formation. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; and, in similar fashion, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher. By contrast, 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.) These are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. 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, and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, 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.

Phonological and orthographic modifications between a base word and its origin may be partial to literacy skills. Studies have indicated that the presence of modification in phonology and orthography makes morphologically complex words harder to understand and that the absence of modification between a base word and its origin makes morphologically complex words easier to understand. Morphologically complex words are easier to comprehend when they include a base word.^[6]

Polysynthetic languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed of many morphemes. For example, the Chukchi word «təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən», meaning «I have a fierce headache», is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən that may be glossed. The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, while 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.

History[edit]

The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a constituency grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis.^[7] Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marāḥ al-arwāḥ and Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas’ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE.^[8]

The linguistic term «morphology» was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.^[a][9]

Fundamental concepts[edit]

Lexemes and word-forms[edit]

The term «word» has no well-defined meaning.^[10] Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals.^[11] For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate. Eat and eats are thus considered different word-forms belonging to the same lexeme eat. Eat and Eater, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts.

Prosodic word vs. morphological word[edit]

Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of ‘NOUN-PHRASE₁ and NOUN-PHRASE₂‘ (as in «apples and oranges») is to suffix ‘-que’ to the second noun phrase: «apples oranges-and». An extreme level of the theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak’wala language.^[b] In Kwak’wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and «semantic case», are formulated by affixes, instead of by independent «words». The three-word English phrase, «with his club», in which ‘with’ identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and ‘his’ denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even one word in many languages. Unlike most other languages, Kwak’wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwak’wala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):^[c]

(Notation notes:

1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.
2. determiners are words such as «the», «this», and «that».
3. the concept of «pivot» is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this discussion.)

That is, to a speaker of Kwak’wala, the sentence does not contain the «words» ‘him-the-otter’ or ‘with-his-club’ Instead, the markers —i-da (PIVOT-‘the’), referring to «man», attaches not to the noun bəgwanəma («man») but to the verb; the markers —χ-a (ACCUSATIVE-‘the’), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q’asa (‘otter’), etc. In other words, a speaker of Kwak’wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:

A central publication on this topic is the volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of «word» in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic-phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory.^[12]

Inflection vs. word formation[edit]

Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme, but other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are inflectional rules, but those of the second kind are rules of word formation.^[13] The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form «new» words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the «same» word (lexeme).

The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples for which linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify the distinction.

Word formation includes a process in which one combines two complete words, but inflection allows the combination of a suffix with a verb to change the latter’s form to that of the subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, ‘go’ is used with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, but third-person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns causes ‘goes’ to be used. The ‘-es’ is therefore an inflectional marker that is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word’s grammatical category, but in the process of inflection, the word never changes its grammatical category.

Types of word formation[edit]

There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation: derivation and compounding. The latter is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher, therefore, is a compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, but the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. The word independent, for example, is derived from the word dependent by using the prefix in-, and dependent itself is derived from the verb depend. There is also word formation in the processes of clipping in which a portion of a word is removed to create a new one, blending in which two parts of different words are blended into one, acronyms in which each letter of the new word represents a specific word in the representation (NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization), borrowing in which words from one language are taken and used in another, and coinage in which a new word is created to represent a new object or concept.^[14]

Paradigms and morphosyntax[edit]

A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs and the declensions of nouns. Also, arranging the word forms of a lexeme into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case, organizes such. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables by using the categories of person (first, second, third); number (singular vs. plural); gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and case (nominative, oblique, genitive).

The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily but must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. Person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English because the language has grammatical agreement rules, which require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. Therefore, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs because the choice between both forms determines the form of the verb that is used. However, no syntactic rule shows the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are nouns, and the other two are adjectives.

An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms that are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, and there are no corresponding syntactic rules for word formation.

The relationship between syntax and morphology, as well as how they interact, is called «morphosyntax»;^[15][16] the term is also used to underline the fact that syntax and morphology are interrelated.^[17] The study of morphosyntax concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, and some approaches to morphosyntax exclude from its domain the phenomena of word formation, compounding, and derivation.^[15] Within morphosyntax fall the study of agreement and government.^[15]

Allomorphy[edit]

Above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats and dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning. In each pair, the first word means «one of X», and the second «two or more of X», and the difference is always the plural form -s (or -es) affixed to the second word, which signals the key distinction between singular and plural entities.

One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that the one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, there are word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep whose difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern or is not signaled at all. Even cases regarded as regular, such as -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in plurals such as dishes, a vowel is added before the -s. Those cases, in which the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a «word», constitute allomorphy.^[18]

Phonological rules constrain the sounds that can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. To «rescue» the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃɪz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.

Lexical morphology[edit]

Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon that, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.

Models[edit]

There are three principal approaches to morphology and each tries to capture the distinctions above in different ways:

• Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an item-and-arrangement approach.
• Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an item-and-process approach.
• Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a word-and-paradigm approach.

While the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list are very strong, they are not absolute.

Morpheme-based morphology[edit]

In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently, the morphemes are said to be in-, de-, pend, -ent, and -ly; pend is the (bound) root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.^[d] In words such as dogs, dog is the root and the -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest and most naïve form, this way of analyzing word forms, called «item-and-arrangement», treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other («concatenated») like beads on a string. More recent and sophisticated approaches, such as distributed morphology, seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenated, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for item-and-arrangement theories and similar approaches.

Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms:^[19]

• Baudouin’s «single morpheme» hypothesis: Roots and affixes have the same status as morphemes.
• Bloomfield’s «sign base» morpheme hypothesis: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.
• Bloomfield’s «lexical morpheme» hypothesis: morphemes, affixes and roots alike are stored in the lexicon.

Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian^[20] and one Hockettian.^[21] For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself.^{[clarification needed]} For Hockett, morphemes are «meaning elements», not «form elements». For him, there is a morpheme plural using allomorphs such as -s, -en and -ren. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, the two views are mixed in unsystematic ways so a writer may refer to «the morpheme plural» and «the morpheme -s» in the same sentence.

Lexeme-based morphology[edit]

Lexeme-based morphology usually takes what is called an item-and-process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form;^[22] a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.

Word-based morphology[edit]

Word-based morphology is (usually) a word-and-paradigm approach. The theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. Word-and-paradigm approaches are also well-suited to capturing purely morphological phenomena, such as morphomes. Examples to show the effectiveness of word-based approaches are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given «piece» of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, «third-person plural». Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation since one says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. The approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation).

Morphological typology[edit]

In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. Some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative whose words tend to have many easily separable morphemes; others yet are inflectional or fusional because their inflectional morphemes are «fused» together. That leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. A standard example of an isolating language is Chinese. An agglutinative language is Turkish. Latin and Greek are prototypical inflectional or fusional languages.

It is clear that this classification is not at all clearcut, and many languages (Latin and Greek among them) do not neatly fit any one of these types, and some fit in more than one way. A continuum of complex morphology of language may be adopted.

The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology. The item-and-arrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages. The item-and-process and word-and-paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.

As there is very little fusion involved in word formation, classical typology mostly applies to inflectional morphology. Depending on the preferred way of expressing non-inflectional notions, languages may be classified as synthetic (using word formation) or analytic (using syntactic phrases).

Examples[edit]

Pingelapese is a Micronesian language spoken on the Pingelap atoll and on two of the eastern Caroline Islands, called the high island of Pohnpei. Similar to other languages, words in Pingelapese can take different forms to add to or even change its meaning. Verbal suffixes are morphemes added at the end of a word to change its form. Prefixes are those that are added at the front. For example, the Pingelapese suffix –kin means ‘with’ or ‘at.’ It is added at the end of a verb.

ius = to use → ius-kin = to use with

mwahu = to be good → mwahu-kin = to be good at

sa- is an example of a verbal prefix. It is added to the beginning of a word and means ‘not.’

pwung = to be correct → sa-pwung = to be incorrect

There are also directional suffixes that when added to the root word give the listener a better idea of where the subject is headed. The verb alu means to walk. A directional suffix can be used to give more detail.

-da = ‘up’ → aluh-da = to walk up

-di = ‘down’ → aluh-di = to walk down

-eng = ‘away from speaker and listener’ → aluh-eng = to walk away

Directional suffixes are not limited to motion verbs. When added to non-motion verbs, their meanings are a figurative one. The following table gives some examples of directional suffixes and their possible meanings.^[23]

Directional suffix	Motion verb	Non-motion verb
-da	up	Onset of a state
-di	down	Action has been completed
-la	away from	Change has caused the start of a new state
-doa	towards	Action continued to a certain point in time
-sang	from	Comparative

See also[edit]

• Morphome (linguistics)

Footnotes[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

• Lecture 7 Morphology in Linguistics 001 by Mark Liberman, ling.upenn.edu
• Intro to Linguistics – Morphology by Jirka Hana, ufal.mff.cuni.cz
• Morphology by Stephen R. Anderson, part of Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, cowgill.ling.yale.edu
• Introduction to Linguistic Theory — Morphology: The Words of Language by Adam Szczegielniak, scholar.harvard.edu
• LIGN120: Introduction to Morphology by Farrell Ackerman and Henry Beecher, grammar.ucsd.edu
• Morphological analysis by P.J.Hancox, cs.bham.ac.uk

2.1. Morphology: definition.

The
notion of morpheme.

Morphology
(Gr. morphe – form, and logos – word) is a branch of grammar that
concerns itself with the internal structure of words and
peculiarities of their grammatical categories and their semantics.

The study
of Modern English morphology consists of four main items,

(1) general
study of morphemes and types of word-form derivation,

(2) the system of parts of
speech,

(3) the
study of each separate part of speech, the grammatical categories
connected with it, and its syntactical functions.

The
morpheme
may be defined as an elementary meaningful segmental component of the
word. It is built up by phonemes and is indivisible into smaller
segments as regards its significative function.

Example:

writers
can be divided into three morphemes:

(1) writ-,
expressing the basic lexical meaning of the word,

(2) —er-,
expressing the idea of agent performing the action indicated by the
root of the verb,

(3) —s,
indicating number, that is, showing that more than one person of the
type indicated is meant.

Two or more
morphemes may sound the same but be basically different, that is,
they may be homonyms.
Thus the -er
morpheme indicating the doer of an action as in writer
has a homonym — the morpheme -er
denoting the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs, as in
longer.

There may
be zero
morphemes,
that is, the absence of a morpheme may indicate a certain meaning.
Thus, if we compare the words book
and books,
both derived from the stem book-,
we may say that while books
is characterised by the –s
morpheme indicating a plural form, book
is characterised by the zero morpheme indicating a singular form.

Traditional
classification of morphemes is based on the two basic criteria:

1. positional
   – the location of the marginal
   morphemes
   (периферийные
   морфемы)
   in relation to the central
   ones
   (центральные
   морфемы)

2. semantic/functional
   – the correlative contribution (соотносительный
   вклад)
   of the morphemes to the general meaning of the word.

According
to this classification, morphemes are divided into:

1. root-morphemes
   (roots)
   – express the concrete, ‘material’ (насыщенная
   конкретным
   содержанием,
   вещественная)
   part of the meaning of the word.

The roots
of notional words are classical lexical
morphemes.

1. affixal
   morphemes (affixes) – express
   the specificational (спецификационная)
   part of the meaning of the word.

This
specification can have lexico-semantic (лексическая)
and grammatico-semantic (грамматическая)
character.

The affixal
morphemes include:

1) prefixes

2) suffixes

Prefixes
and lexical suffixes have word-building functions, and form the stem
of the word together with the root.

3)
inflexions
(флексия)/grammatical
suffix
(Blokh)

The
morpheme serves to derive a grammatical form; it has no lexical
meaning of its own and expresses different morphological categories.

The
abstract complete morphemic model of the common English word is the
following: prefix + root + lexical suffix + inflection/grammatical
suffix.

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Morphology is the study of words and their parts. Morphemes, like prefixes, suffixes and base words, are defined as the smallest meaningful units of meaning. Morphemes are important for phonics in both reading and spelling, as well as in vocabulary and comprehension.

Why use morphology

Teaching morphemes unlocks the structures and meanings within words. It is very useful to have a strong awareness of prefixes, suffixes and base words. These are often spelt the same across different words, even when the sound changes, and often have a consistent purpose and/or meaning.

Types of morphemes

Free vs. bound

Morphemes can be either single words (free morphemes) or parts of words (bound morphemes).

A free morpheme can stand alone as its own word

• gentle
• father
• licence
• picture
• gem

A bound morpheme only occurs as part of a word

• -s as in cat+s
• -ed as in crumb+ed
• un- as in un+happy
• mis- as in mis-fortune
• -er as in teach+er

In the example above: un+system+atic+al+ly, there is a root word (system) and bound morphemes that attach to the root (un-, -atic, -al, -ly)

system = root un-, -atic, -al, -ly = bound morphemes

If two free morphemes are joined together they create a compound word. These words are a great way to introduce morphology (the study of word parts) into the classroom.

For more details, see:
Compound words

Inflectional vs. d​​erivational

Morphemes can also be divided into inflectional or derivational morphemes.

Inflectional morphemes change what a word does in terms of grammar, but does not create a new word.

For example, the word <skip> has many forms: skip (base form), skipping (present progressive), skipped (past tense).

The inflectional morphemes -ing and -ed are added to the base word skip, to indicate the tense of the word.

If a word has an inflectional morpheme, it is still the same word, with a few suffixes added. So if you looked up <skip> in the dictionary, then only the base word <skip> would get its own entry into the dictionary. Skipping and skipped are listed under skip, as they are inflections of the base word. Skipping and skipped do not get their own dictionary entry.

Skip

Another example is <run>: run (base form), running (present progressive), ran (past tense). In this example the past tense marker changes the vowel of the word: run (rhymes with fun), to ran (rhymes with can). However, the inflectional morphemes -ing and past tense morpheme are added to the base word <run>, and are listed in the same dictionary entry.

Run

Derivational morphemes are different to inflectional morphemes, as they do derive/create a new word, which gets its own entry in the dictionary. Derivational morphemes help us to create new words out of base words.

For example, we can create new words from <act> by adding derivational prefixes (e.g. re- en-) and suffixes (e.g. -or).

Thus out of <act> we can get re+act = react en+act = enact act+or = actor.

Whenever a derivational morpheme is added, a new word (and dictionary entry) is derived/created.

For the <act> example, the following dictionary entries can be found:

Act

React

Enact

Actor

Teachers should highlight and encourage students to analyse both Inflectional and Derivational morphemes when focussing on phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension.

For more information, see: 

Prefixes, suffixes, and roots/bases

Many morphemes are very helpful for analysing unfamiliar words. Morphemes can be divided into prefixes, suffixes, and roots/bases.

• Prefixes are morphemes that attach to the front of a root/base word.
• Suffixes are morphemes that attach to the end of a root/base word, or to other suffixes (see example below)
• Roots/Base words are morphemes that form the base of a word, and usually carry its meaning.
  • Generally, base words are free morphemes, that can stand by themselves (e.g. cycle as in bicycle/cyclist, and form as in transform/formation).
  • Whereas root words are bound morphemes that cannot stand by themselves (e.g. -ject as in subject/reject, and -volve as in evolve/revolve).

Most morphemes can be divided into:

• Anglo-Saxon Morphemes (like re-, un-, and -ness);
• Latin Morphemes (like non-, ex-, -ion, and -ify); and
• Greek Morphemes (like micro, photo, graph).

It is useful to highlight how words can be broken down into morphemes (and which each of these mean) and how they can be built up again).

For example, the word <unreliability> may be unfamiliar to students when they first encounter it.

If <unreliability> is broken into its morphemes, students can deduce or infer the meaning.

So it is helpful for both reading and spelling to provide opportunities to analyse words, and become familiar with common morphemes, including their meaning and function.

Compound words

Compound words (or compounds) are created by joining free morphemes together. Remember that a free morpheme is a morpheme that can stand along as its own word (unlike bound morphemes — e.g. -ly, -ed, re-, pre-). Compounds are a fun and accessible way to introduce the idea that words can have multiple parts (morphemes). Teachers can highlight that these compound words are made up of two separate words joined together to make a new word. For example dog + house = doghouse

Examples

Example activities of highlighting morphemes for phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension

There are numerous ways to highlight morphemes for the purpose of phonics, vocabulary and comprehension activities and lessons.

Highlighting the morphology of words is useful for explaining phonics patterns (graphemes) and spelling rules, as well as discovering the meanings of unfamiliar words, and demonstrating how words are linked together. Highlighting and analysing morphemes is also useful, therefore, for providing comprehension strategies.

Examples of how to embed morphological awareness into literacy activities can include:

• Sorting words by base/root words (word families), or by prefixes or suffixes
• Word Detective — Students break longer words down into their prefixes, suffixes, and base words
• e.g. Find the morphemes in multi-morphemic words like: dissatisfied unstoppable ridiculously hydrophobic metamorphosis oxygenate fortifications
• Word Builder — students are given base words and prefixes/suffixes and see how many words they can build, and what meaning they might have:
• Prefixes: un- de- pre- re- co- con-
  Base Words: play help flex bend blue sad sat
  Suffixes: -ful -ly -less -able/-ible -ing -ion -y -ish -ness -ment
• Etymology investigation — students are given multi-morphemic words from texts they have been reading and are asked to research the origins (etymology) of the word. Teachers could use words like progressive, circumspect, revocation, and students could find out the morphemes within each word, their etymology, meanings, and use.

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Definition and Examples of English Morphology

Updated on August 14, 2019

Morphology is the branch of linguistics (and one of the major components of grammar) that studies word structures, especially regarding morphemes, which are the smallest units of language. They can be base words or components that form words, such as affixes. The adjective form is morphological.

Morphology Over Time

Traditionally, a basic distinction has been made between morphology—which is primarily concerned with the internal structures of words—and syntax, which is primarily concerned with how words are put together in sentences.

«The term ‘morphology’ has been taken over from biology where it is used to denote the study of the forms of plants and animals … It was first used for linguistic purposes in 1859 by the German linguist August Schleicher (Salmon 2000), to refer to the study of the form of words,» noted Geert E. Booij, in «An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology.» (3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2012)

In recent decades, however, numerous linguists have challenged this distinction. See, for example, lexicogrammar and lexical-functional grammar (LFG), which consider the interrelationship—even interdependence—between words and grammar.

Branches of and Approaches to Morphology

The two branches of morphology include the study of the breaking apart (the analytic side) and the reassembling (the synthetic side) of words; to wit, inflectional morphology concerns the breaking apart of words into their parts, such as how suffixes make different verb forms. ​Lexical word formation, in contrast, concerns the construction of new base words, especially complex ones that come from multiple morphemes. Lexical word formation is also called lexical morphology and derivational morphology.

Author David Crystal gives these examples:

«For English, [morphology] means devising ways of describing the properties of such disparate items as a, horse, took, indescribable, washing machine, and antidisestablishmentarianism. A widely recognized approach divides the field into two domains: lexical or derivational morphology studies the way in which new items of vocabulary can be built up out of combinations of elements (as in the case of in-describ-able); inflectional morphology studies the ways words vary in their form in order to express a grammatical contrast (as in the case of horses, where the ending marks plurality).» («The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language,» 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003)

And authors Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fuderman also discuss and give examples of the two approaches this way:

«The analytic approach has to do with breaking words down, and it is usually associated with American structuralist linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century….No matter what language we’re looking at, we need analytic methods that are independent of the structures we are examining; preconceived notions might interfere with an objective, scientific analysis. This is especially true when dealing with unfamiliar languages.
«The second approach to morphology is more often associated with theory than with methodology, perhaps unfairly. This is the synthetic approach. It basically says, ‘I have a lot of little pieces here. How do I put them together?’ This question presupposes that you already know what the pieces are. Analysis must in some way precede synthesis.» (Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman, «What Is Morphology?» 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)