Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language.

[1][2] Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning.

Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect.

Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over the history of a language.

The basic fields of linguistics broadly focus on language structure at different "scales".

Morphology is considered to operate at a scale larger than phonology, which investigates the categories of speech sounds that are distinguished within a spoken language, and thus may constitute the difference between a morpheme and another.

Conversely, syntax is concerned with the next-largest scale, and studies how words in turn form phrases and sentences.

Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals.

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".

"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: kwixʔidclubbedi-da-bəgwanəmaPIVOT-the-maniχ-a-q'asahit-the-otters-isi-t'alwagwayuwith-hisi-clubkwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-isi-t'alwagwayuclubbed PIVOT-the-mani hit-the-otter with-hisi-clubA 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.

[10] A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme.

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.

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.

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.

There are three principal approaches to morphology and each tries to capture the distinctions above in different ways: While the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list are very strong, they are not absolute.

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".

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 three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology.

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).

Similar to other languages, words in Pingelapese can take different forms to add to or even change its meaning.

There are also directional suffixes that when added to the root word give the listener a better idea of where the subject is headed.