Morphology

Morphology (linguistics)


In [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], morphology
is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and
other units of meaning in a language like [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and parts
of speech and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]/[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], implied [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (words in a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] are the subject
matter of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).
Morphological
typology represents a way of classifying languages according to the ways by
which morphemes are used in a language —from the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
that use only isolated morphemes, through the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] ("stuck-together")
and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] that use bound
morphemes ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]),
up to the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], which compress lots of
separate morphemes into single words.


While words are generally
accepted as being (with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) the smallest units of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], it is clear that in most
languages, if not all, words can be related to other words by rules ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]). For
example, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] speakers recognize that the words dog
and dogs are closely related — differentiated only by the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] morpheme
"-s," which is only found [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
to nouns, and is never separate. Speakers of English (a fusional language)
recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word
formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs
as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher
as dish is to dishwasher, in one sense. The rules understood by
the speaker 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 patterns of word
formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that
model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.


A language like [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
instead uses unbound ("free") morphemes, but depends on post-phrase
affixes, and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
to convey meaning. However, this cannot be said of present-day Mandarin, in
which most words are compounds (around 80%), and most roots are bound.


In the Chinese languages,
these are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language.
Beyond the agglutinative languages, a polysynthetic language like [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
will have words composed of many morphemes: The word
"təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən" is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən,
that can be [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
1.SG.SUBJ-great-head-hurt-PRES.1, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
'I have a fierce headache.' The morphology of such languages allow for each
consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, just as the grammars of the
language key the usage and understanding of each morpheme.


History


The history of morphological
analysis dates back to the ancient
Indian linguist [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who formulated the 3,959 rules of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] morphology in the
text [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}