In linguistics, morphology () is the study
of words, how they are formed, and their relationship
to other words in the same language.
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, and lexicology, which
is the study of words and how they make up
a language's vocabulary.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 depending
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.Polysynthetic
languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed
of many morphemes.
The Chukchi word "təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən",
for example, 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 ==
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.
Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by
Marāḥ al-arwāḥ and Aḥmad b. ‘alī
Mas‘ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE.The
linguistic term "morphology" was coined by
August Schleicher in 1859.
== Fundamental concepts ==
=== Lexemes and word forms ===
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning.
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.
For instance, the lexeme eat contains the
word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate.
Eat and eats are thus considered different
words-forms belonging to the same lexeme eat.
Eat and Eater, on the other hand, are different
lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts.
Thus, there are three rather different notions
of ‘word’.
==== Prosodic word vs. morphological word
====
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", as it were.
An extreme level of this theoretical quandary
posed by some phonological words is provided
by the Kwak'wala language.
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",
where 'with' identifies its dependent noun
phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes
a possession relation, would consist of two
words or even just one word in many languages.
Unlike most 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):kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəmai-χ-a
q'asa-s-isi t'alwagwayu
Morpheme by morpheme translation:
kwixʔid-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINERbəgwanəma-χ-a
= man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINERq'asa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3SG-POSSESSIVEt'alwagwayu
= club"the man 
clubbed the otter with his club."(Notation
notes:
accusative case marks an entity that something
is done to.
determiners are words such as "the", "this",
"that".
the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct
that is not relevant to this discussion.)That
is, to the 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:
kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-isi-t'alwagwayu
clubbed PIVOT-the-mani hit-the-otter with-hisi-club
A central publication on this topic is the
recent volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald
(2007), 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.
=== Inflection vs. word formation ===
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; while other rules
relate to different lexemes.
Rules of the first kind are inflectional rules,
while those of the second kind are rules of
word formation.
The generation of the English plural dogs
from dog is an inflectional rule, while 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), while
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 where linguists fail
to agree whether a given rule is inflection
or word formation.
The next section will attempt to clarify this
distinction.
Word formation is a process where one combines
two complete words, whereas with inflection
you can combine a suffix with some verb to
change its form to subject of the sentence.
For example: in the present indefinite, we
use ‘go’ with subject I/we/you/they and
plural nouns, whereas for third person singular
pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we
use ‘goes’.
So this ‘-es’ is an inflectional marker
and 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 whereas in the
process of inflection the word never changes
its grammatical category.
=== Types of word formation ===
There is a further distinction between two
primary kinds of morphological word formation:
derivation and compounding.
Compounding 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 (i.e. non-independent)
forms to existing lexemes, whereby 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-, while 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 i.e.
NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
borrowing in which words from one language
are taken and used in another, and finally
coinage in which a new word is created to
represent a new object or concept.
=== Paradigms and morphosyntax ===
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, 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; they 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
English has grammatical agreement rules that
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 these two
forms determines which form of the verb is
used.
However, no syntactic rule for the difference
between dog and dog catcher, or dependent
and independent.
The first two are nouns and the second 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
is called "morphosyntax" and concerns itself
with inflection and paradigms, not with word
formation or compounding.
=== Allomorphy ===
Above, morphological rules are described as
analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs
as cat is to cats and as 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", while the second "two or more of X", and
the difference is always the plural form -s
(or -es) affixed to the second word, signaling
the key distinction between singular and plural
entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in
morphology is that this 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, where
the 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.
These cases, where the same distinction is
effected by alternative forms of a "word",
constitute allomorphy.
Phonological rules constrain which sounds
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.
In order 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 ===
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology
that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically
conceived, is the collection of lexemes in
a language.
As such, it concerns itself primarily with
word formation: derivation and compounding.
== Models ==
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 ===
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-, depend, -ent, and ly;
depend is the root and the other morphemes
are, in this case, derivational affixes.
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:
Baudoin’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 and one
Hockettian.
For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal
form with meaning, but did not have meaning
itself.
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 ===
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; 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 ===
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 ==
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 lots of 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 ==
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 gives 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.
== References ==
== Further reading ==
