definition of morphology

1. Morphology
Thennarasu Sakkan

2. Morphology is a sub-discipline of Linguistics.Morphology is a sub-discipline of Linguistics.
MorphologyMorphology
The term morphology was an adoption of the German
word ‘morphologie’ first used by August Schleicher in
1959.
Morphology is the study of internal structure of words.
The term ‘morphology’ was invented in 20th Century.
Syntax is the study of formal relationships between
words.

3. Morphology is the study of internal structure of words.
Morphology is the study of the way words are built up
from smaller meaning-bearing units, morphemes. A
morpheme is often defined as the minimal meaning-
bearing unit in a language.
The word fox consists of a single morpheme (the
morpheme fox) while the word cats consists of two: the
morpheme cat and the morpheme -s.
It is often useful to distinguish two broad classes of
morphemes: stems and affixes.

4. Affixes are further divided into prefixes, suffixes, infixes,
and circumfixes.
Prefixes precede the stem,
suffixes follow the stem,
circumfixes do both,
and infixes are inserted inside the stem.
Affixes are further divided into prefixes, suffixes, infixes,
and circumfixes.
Prefixes precede the stem,
suffixes follow the stem,
circumfixes do both,
and infixes are inserted inside the stem.
For example, the word eats is composed of a stem eat and
the suffix -s.
The word unmarried is composed of a stem married and
the prefix un-.
English doesn’t have circumfixes, but many other
languages do. 3

5. In German, for example, the past participle of some verbs
formed by adding ge- to the beginning of the stem and -t to
the end; so the past participle of the verb sagen (to say) is
gesagt (said).
Infixes, in which a morpheme is inserted in the middle of a
word, occur very commonly for example in the Philipine
language Tagalog.
For example the affix –um-, which marks the agent of an
action, is infixed to the Tagalog stem hingi ‘borrow’ to
produce humingi.
We call words like /nuts/ morphologically complex
words.

6. Prefixes and suffixes are often called concatenative
morphology since a word is composed of a number of
morphemes concatenated together.
A number of languages have extensive non-
concatenative morphology, in which morphemes are
combined in more complex ways.
The Tagalog infixation example above is one example of
non-concatenative morphology, since two morphemes
(hingi and um) are intermingled. Another kind of non-
concatenative morphology is called templatic
morphology or root and-pattern morphology.

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