What is Morphology? And Basic concepts of morphology

1. MORPHOLOGY
Presenter: Ibadullah Salih
Instructor: Sir. Mubariz Zirman
Class: Junior
Subject: Linguistics
Add: Nangarhar University of Language
and Literature Faculty Afghanistan

2. WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY?
• Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies
the structure of words and their formation.
• It examines the ways in which words are constructed
from smaller units of meaning called morphemes.
• In this response, I will provide a comprehensive
explanation of morphology, including its basic
concepts, key terminology, and practical
applications.
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Presenter Ibadullah Salih Insr: Sir. Mubariz Zirman
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3. BASIC CONCEPTS:
1. Morpheme: The smallest unit of meaning in a language that
cannot be further divided into smaller meaningful units. For
example, "un-" in "undo" is a morpheme that means
"reverse."
2. Word: A unit of language consisting of one or more
morphemes that can stand alone as a meaningful expression.
For example, "undo" is a word that consists of two
morphemes: "un-" and "do."
3. Lexicon: The mental dictionary of a speaker's knowledge of
the words in their language.
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Presenter Ibadullah Salih Insr: Sir. Mubariz Zirman
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4. CONTINUOUS
4. Inflection: A type of word formation that modifies the
form of a word to indicate grammatical information such
as tense, number, gender, or case. For example, the "-ed"
ending in "walked" indicates past tense.
5. Derivation: A type of word formation that creates new
words by adding morphemes to a base word. For example,
"happiness" is derived from the base word "happy" by
adding the suffix "-ness."
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Presenter Ibadullah Salih Insr: Sir. Mubariz Zirman
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5. Key Terminology:
1. Affix: A morpheme that is attached to a word to change
its meaning or function. Affixes can be prefixes
(attached to the beginning of a word), suffixes
(attached to the end of a word), or infixes (inserted
into the middle of a word).
2. Stem: The main part of a word to which affixes are
added. For example, the stem of "unhappiness" is
"happy."
3. Root: The basic unit of a word to which affixes are
added. For example, the root of "happiness" is "happy."
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Presenter Ibadullah Salih Insr: Sir. Mubariz Zirman 5

6. Continuous
4. Bound morpheme: A morpheme that cannot stand alone
as a word and must be attached to another word. For
example, the suffix "-ment" in "enjoyment" is a bound
morpheme.
5. Free morpheme: A morpheme that can stand alone as a
word. For example, "cat" is a free morpheme.
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7. Practical Applications:
Morphology has practical applications in fields such as language
teaching, natural language processing, and speech therapy. Here are
some examples:
1. Language teaching: Understanding morphology can help learners
of a new language to break down words into their component
parts and recognize patterns of word formation.
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8. Continues
2. Natural language processing: Morphology is an important
component of natural language processing systems that
can identify and analyse the structure of words in a text.
3. Speech therapy: Knowledge of morphology can help
speech therapists to diagnose and treat language
disorders such as morphological deficits, where a person
has difficulty with word formation or inflection.
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9. Conclusion
All in all, I provided a comprehensive explanation
of morphology, including its basic concepts, key
terminology, and practical applications.
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Presenter Ibadullah Salih Insr: Sir. Mubariz Zirman 9

10. Thank you Very Much From your
Great Attention
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Presenter Ibadullah Salih Insr: Sir. Mubariz Zirman
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