c





  

In linguistics, the internal construction system of words and its study.

Languages vary widely in the number of morphemes a word can have. English has
many words with multiple morphemes (e.g., —
   is composed of — ,
 , and
 ). Many American Indian languages have a highly complex morphology; other
languages, such as Chinese, have a simple one. Morphology includes the grammatical
processes of inflection, marking categories like person, tense, and case (e.g., the  in


marks the third-person singular in the present tense), and derivation, the
formation of new words from existing words (e.g., 
 from 
).

In linguistics, j
   is the study of word structure. While words are

generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not
all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English
speakers recognize that the words dog, dog and dog — are closely related.
English speakers recognize these relations by virtue of the unconscious linguistic
knowledge they have of the rules of word-formation processes in English. Therefore,
these speakers intuit that dog is to dog just as  is to  , or o
di is to
o
di ; similarly, dog is to dog — as di is to di  —. The rules
comprehended by the speaker in each case reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in
the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in
speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such patterns
of word-formation across and within languages, and attempts to explicate formal rules
reflective of the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.




The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist
Pāÿini who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text
mÿÿ d  . The Graeco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in
morphological analysis.

The term o—
oog was coined by August Schleicher in 1859: — di   — 
od —o—o—  i d o—o—
oogi  ("for the science of word formation, I
choose the term 'morphology'", oi—  md. 
—i 7/1/7, 35). It derives from
the Greek words ǍǐǒǗƿ ("form") and njǝDŽǐǓ ("explanation, account").

^
j



j


j

The term "word" is ambiguous in common usage. To take up again the example
of dog vs. dog , there is one sense in which these two are the same "word" (they are
both nouns that refer to the same kind of animal, differing only in number), and
another sense in which they are different words (they can't generally be used in the
same sentences without altering other words to fit; for example, the verbs i and — in
 dogi  

 and  dog —  

).
 The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most
important one in morphology. The first sense of "word," the one in which dog and dog
are "the same word," is called j. The second sense is called 

j. We thus
say that dog and dog are different forms of the same lexeme. og and dog —, on
the other hand, are different lexemes; for example, they refer to two different kinds of
entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical
form of a word is called a lemma, or 

j.





j


Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of

morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate different forms of the same
lexeme; while other rules relate two different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called



, while those of the second kind are called 

j
. The
English plural, as illustrated by dog and dog , is an inflectional rule; compounds like
dog — or di  — provide an example of a word-formation rule. Informally,
word-formation rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules
yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).

There is a further distinction between two kinds of word-formation: derivation

and compounding. Compounding is a process of word-formation that involves
combining complete word-forms into a single  j
 form; dog — is therefore
a compound, because both dog and  — are complete word-forms in their own right
before the compounding process was applied, and are subsequently treated as one
form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes,
whereby the addition of the affix 
 a new lexeme. One example of derivation is
clear in this case: the word id
d  is derived from the word d
d  by
prefixing it with the derivational prefix i, while d
d  itself is derived from
d
d, the French present participle of d
d— which means "to hang down"
(and is also a cognate of the English verb d
d).

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.


j
j
 


A 
j 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. Accordingly, the word-forms of a lexeme may be arranged
conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories
such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal
pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person,
number, gender and case.

The inflectional categories used to group word-forms into paradigms cannot be

chosen arbitrarily; they must be grammatical categories that are relevant to stating
the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are grammatical
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. In other words,
the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dog , because
the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used.
In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between
dog and dog —, or d
d  and id
d . The first two are just nouns, and
the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or
adjective behaves.

An important difference between inflection and word-formation is that inflected

word-forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the
requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word-formation are not restricted
by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant
to syntax, and word-formation not so. The part of morphology that covers the
relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns
itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word-formation or compounding.

 j

j
 
 

In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between

word-forms: dog is to dog as  is to  , and as di is to di . 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  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, we have word form pairs like ox/ox , goo /g , and

/
, 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
considered "regular", with the final  , are not so simple; the  in dog is not
pronounced the same way as the  in  , and in a plural like di , an "extra"
vowel appears before the  . These cases, where the same distinction is effected by
alternative changes to the form of a word, are called  j
.

There are several kinds of allomorphy. One is pure allomorphy, where the
allomorphs are just arbitrary. Other, more extreme cases of allomorphy are called
suppletion, where two forms related by a morphological rule cannot be explained as
being related on a phonological basis: for example, the past of go is  , which is a
suppletive form.

On the other hand, other kinds of allomorphy are due to the interaction
between morphology and phonology. 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 di by
simply appending an  to the end of the word would result in the form *[d± s], 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 [d±
z] results. This is
an example of vowel epenthesis in English. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of
the  in dog and  : it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final
preceding phoneme.

The study of allomorphy that results from the interaction of morphology and
phonology is called morphophonology. Many morphophonological rules fall under the
category of sandhi.

j
  

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.

 j
  

There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture
the distinctions above in different ways. These are, 

O Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement

approach.
O Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process
approach.
O Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm
approach.

Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in
that list is very strong, it is not absolute.

jj
  

In morpheme-based morphology, word-forms are analyzed as sequences of

morphemes. A j
j is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In
a word like id
d , we say that the morphemes are i, d
d,  , and ;
d
d is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[1] In
a word like dog , we say that dog is the root, and that  is an inflectional morpheme.
This way of analyzing word-forms as if they were made of morphemes put after each
other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement.

The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology

usually think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to such
an extent that very often beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable,
fundamental notion of morphology, and many five-minute explanations of morphology
are, in fact, five-minute explanations of morpheme-based morphology. This is,
however, not so. The fundamental idea of morphology is that the words of a language
are related to each other by different kinds of rules. Analyzing words as sequences of
morphemes is a way of describing these relations, but is not the only way. In actual
academic linguistics, morpheme-based morphology certainly has many adherents, but
is by no means the dominant approach.

Applying a strictly morpheme-based model quickly leads to complications when

one tries to analyze many forms of allomorphy. For example, the word dog is easily
broken into the root dog and the plural morpheme  . The same analysis is
straightforward for ox , assuming the stem ox and a suppletive plural morpheme  .
How then would the same analysis "split up" the word g into a root and a plural
morpheme? In the same manner, how to split
?

Theorists wishing to maintain a strict morpheme-based approach often preserve

the idea in cases like these by saying that g is goo followed by a
j
j
(a morpheme that has no phonological content), and that the vowel change in the stem
is a morphophonological rule. Also, morpheme-based analyses commonly posit null
morphemes even in the absence of any allomorphy. For example, if the plural noun
dog is analyzed as a root dog followed by a plural morpheme  , then one might
analyze the singular dog as the root dog followed by a null morpheme for the singular.

jj
  

Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) 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  — 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.

The Item-and-Process approach bypasses the difficulties inherent in the Item-

and-Arrangement approaches. Faced with a plural like g , one is not required to
assume a null morpheme: while the plural of dog is formed by affixing  , the plural of
goo is formed simply by altering the vowel in the stem.

c
j
  

Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-Paradigm approach. This

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. The examples 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 just 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. Word-and-Paradigm 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 than the one that has been
used historically can give rise to a new word, such as od — replacing d — (where
od — follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and o replacing i
(where o fits the regular pattern of plural formation). While a Word-and-Paradigm
approach can explain this easily, other approaches have difficulty with phenomena
such as this.

    

In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of

languages according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages
are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their
words tend to have lots of easily-separable morphemes; while others yet are fusional,
because their inflectional morphemes are said to be "fused" together. The classic
example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative
language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.

Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this
classification is not at all clear-cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of
these types. However, examined against the light of the three general models of
morphology described above, it is also clear that the classification is very much biased
towards a morpheme-based conception of morphology. It makes direct use of the
notion of morpheme in the definition of agglutinative and fusional languages. It
describes the latter as having separate morphemes "fused" together (which often does
correspond to the history of the language, but not to its synchronic reality).

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; while the Item-and-Process
and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.

The reader should also note that the classical typology also mostly applies to
inflectional morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word-formation.
Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation,
depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either
by using word-formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).

^ 


1. R The existence of words like 

dix and
dig in English does not mean
that the English word d
d is analyzed into a derivational prefix d  and a
root
d. While all those were indeed once related to each other by
morphological rules, this was so only ii, not in English. English borrowed
the words from French and Latin, but not the morphological rules that allowed
Latin speakers to combine d  and the verb
d — 'to hang' into the derivative
d
d — .


c
^
j


  j

 ‡ The creation of a new word out of several existing ones, e.g.
bathroom, armchair, university degree. What are the properties of compounds?
Compounds consist of a head (the right element, carrying the principal meaning) and
a modifier (the left element) They are endocentric (syntactic and semantic head)
exocentric (syntactic but not semantic head)copulative (no head-modifier relationship,
both parts are equal)verbal (modifier is object of corresponding verb) Compounds are
recursive: bath towel room sale rack

 
 ‡ are created by blending two existing words to form a new one.Typically,
you take the beginning of one word and the end of another e.g. sm oke + f og -> smog
rockumentary edutainment celesbian guesstimate etc.


 ‡ are created by shortening an exisiting word usually the first or stressed
syllables are taken e.g. lab oratory -> lab mike fax mod con sci-fi etc.

 

j ‡ are created by using the initial letters of a longer name or term which
consists of several words the new form is pronounced as a word (not just letters, then
it¶s a simple abbreviation ) e.g. ra dio d etection a nd r anging -> radar NATO NAFTA
FYROM WYSIWYG etc.



  

 ‡ often a case of folk etymology occurs when a complex
word is reanalyzed morphologically, and the components are used as morphemes
themselves e.g. hamburger : hamburg + er -> ham + burger ,burger = patty eaten in a
bun the new morpheme burger is now used to create new words, e.g. cheeseburger ,
tofuburger , chickenburger.

 
 ‡ How about new words in ²thon and ²rama or ²holic ? There are
many neologisms, especially in the world of advertizing or in journalism, ending in ²
thon and ²rama or ²holic. Are they blends, are they a case of reanalysis, or have these
endings become suffixes in English? Watch out for some examples:
] -rama Anything that offers a (metaphorical) panorama , i.e. a wide range, of some
thing or activity Images removed for filesize reasons -holic HORSEAHOLIC.COM is
dedicated to the promotion of Canada's national horse the "Cheval
Canadien". Craft-a-holic Knitting, Rubber Stamping, Scrapbooking, Book
Binding, Soap Making, and on and on and on . . . The Salt-O-Holic Message Board
Becoming a Font-a-holic... and Loving It Any Åaddiction´ to a hobby or favorite thing
makes you an X-a-holic




 ‡ New words are not created from native stock but borrowed from other
languages so-called loanwords e.g. anorak , parka , igloo (from Inuit), wurst , stein ,
ersatz (from German), aficionado , burrito , cockroach (from Spanish), khaki ,
bungalow , juggernaut (from Indian), etc.

Reference:

http://www.slideshare.net/dr.shadiabanjar/morphology-word-formation-presentation

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Morphology_%28linguistics%29