WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY? |
Morphology is one of the branches of linguistics that studies the form and structure of words in terms of morphemes. Broadly, we can say that morphology is the scientific study and description of word-formation. |
What is a Morpheme? |
Morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. It is a meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as ‘Human’, or a word element, such as ‘-ing’ in ‘Playing’, ‘-ed’ in ‘Cooked’ that can never be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Morpheme is the smallest part of morphology and that cannot be divided into another smaller meaningful part. For example, words like ‘saves, saved, saving, saver’ must consist of one main and meaningful element ‘Save’ and multiple other elements like, ‘-s, -ed,-ing, -er’. In the word ‘re-invent-ed’, there are three morphemes, ‘re’- means ‘again’, ‘invent’-the root word, and ‘-ed’-indicates the past tense. All these are minimal units, i.e. morphemes. Similarly, in another word, ‘Play-er-s’, we have again three morphemes, namely, ‘play’, ‘-er’ and ‘-s’ |
Types of Morphemes |
‘Free Morphemes’ and ‘Bound morphemes’ are the two main types of Morphemes. Free Morphemes a. Lexical Morphemes b. Grammatical/Functional Morphemes Bound Morphemes a. Derivational Morphemes b. Inflectional Morphemes |
Difference between ‘Inflectional Morpheme’ and ‘Derivational Morpheme’:
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also see:
PHONETICS |
SYNTAX |
SEMANTICS | GRAMMAR_1 |
USEFUL EXPRESSIONS IN ENGLISH SPEAKING | GRAMMAR_2 |
DAILY GRAMMAR LESSON-WORKSHEETS | WORD FORMATION PROCESSES |