Morphology

The study of words and the components that make them up is called morphology. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of meaning, and they are defined in the same way that prefixes, suffixes, and base words are. Reading and spelling, as well as vocabulary and comprehension, benefit greatly from an understanding of morphemes, which play a key role in phonics. 

Morphology definition: 

The organisation of a language’s smallest meaningful elements and the interactions between them are referred to as morphology. So, what exactly does all of this entail? Sounds are the foundation of all human language. The formation of words, phrases, and, ultimately, sentences is accomplished by putting particular sounds together in a predetermined order. The sending and receiving of messages takes place in this manner.

You need to be familiar with the term “morpheme” in order to comprehend morphology. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit that can be broken down into a word. That meaning is how communications are transmitted from one language to another. Morphemes are more than just letters. A morpheme is a meaningful word portion that results from the combination of several letters into a single unit to create a new word. Morphology is the study of the different ways in which these building blocks of meaning, also known as word parts, can be arranged within a language.  

History: 

Morphological analysis can be traced back to the ancient Indian linguist known as Pini. He used a constituency grammar to write the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology that are found in the text Adhyay. Additionally, morphological analysis were conducted within the Greco-Roman grammatical tradition. Morphological research into the Arabic language was first carried out by Mar al-arw and Amad b. Al-Mas’d around the year 1200 CE at the earliest. 

In the year 1859, August Schleicher was the one who first came up with the term “morphology” to describe the study of language. 

Fundamental concepts: 

Lexemes and word forms: 

The definition of the term “word” cannot be precisely defined. Instead, morphology makes use of two concepts that are related to one another: lexeme and word-form. A lexeme is, in general, a collection of inflected word forms, and it is frequently represented by the citation form written in small capitals. 

Types of word formation: 

There is an additional distinction that may be made between the two basic types of morphological word construction, which are compounding and derivation. Words can be formed through a process known as compounding, which is the combination of two or more entire word forms into a single compound form. Because both “dog” and “catcher” are fully formed word forms in their own right, but are thereafter treated as components of a single form, the term “dog catcher” is considered to be a compound. Affixing bound, or non-independent, forms to preexisting lexemes is what constitutes the process of derivation. This results in the creation of a new lexeme as a result of the addition of the affix. By way of illustration, the word independent is formed from the word dependent through the utilisation of the prefix in-, but the word dependent itself is derived from the verb to depend. 

Allomorphy: 

As previously mentioned, morphological rules are presented in the form of analogies between the various forms of a word. For example, dog is to dogs what cat is to cats and dish is to dishes. In this instance, the analogy applies to both the form of the words and their meaning: in each pair, the first word means “one of X,” while the second word means “two or more of X,” and the difference is always the plural form -s (or -es) affixed to the second word, signalling the key distinction between singular and plural entities. In other words, the first word means “one of X,” while the second word means “two or more of X.”

This one-to-one correlation between meaning and form seldom ever applies to every instance of the language, which is one of the primary factors that contributes to the complexity of morphology. There are some word form pairs in the English language, such as “ox” and “oxen,” “goose” and “geese,” and “sheep” and “sheep,” in which the distinction between the singular and the plural is signalled in a way that deviates from the regular pattern, or is not signalled at all. Other examples include “goose” and “sheep.” Even the cases that are considered to be regular, such as -s, are not as straightforward as one might think. For example, the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in plurals such as dishes, a vowel comes before the -s. The phenomenon known as allomorphy refers to situations in which different forms of a “word” are able to convey the same meaning. 

Lexical morphology: 

The lexicon is the collection of lexemes in a language, and lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon. Morphologically speaking, the lexicon is conceived of as the collection of lexemes. As such, it is largely concerned with the processes of word construction, including compounding and derivation. 

Conclusion

The study of the rules that govern the formation of words in a language is referred to as morphology. Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. Teachers of other languages who have a working knowledge of English morphology are better equipped to assist their students in comprehending how words enter a language, what they are composed of, and how they are created by mixing prefixes, suffixes, and roots.