2. What is Morphology?
• Morphology is a branch of linguistics that involves the study of the
grammatical structure of words and how words are formed and varied
within the lexicon of any given language.
• Morphology studies the relationship between morphemes, referring to
the smallest meaningful unit in a word, and how these units can be
arranged to create new words or new forms of the same word.
3. Morphemes
• A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a word.
• There are two types of morphemes: bound and free morphemes.
4.
5. Root, Base & Stem
• A base, “often used as an all-purpose term, refers to a form to which
affixes of any kind (both derivational and inflectional) can be added”
• To know more about it, there is an example below:
• “nation” (base = root = stem)
• “national” = nation (R) + al (Suf) (base = root + a suffix = stem)
• “inter-nation-al” (base = root + a prefix & a suffix = stem)
• “internationalist” (base = root + a prefix & two suffixes = stem)
