Definition of Morphology

The word morphology can basically be defined in term of object of study, methodology, and unit of analysis. Consequently, morphology is the study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined  in the languages of the world . Depending on how they’re used in sentences and the way forms of words are varied. A lively introduction to this subject, this textbook provide little background in morphology . I will cover three chapters of this textbook and introduce morphology  in different ways.

The first chapter, is divided to four main items . Explaining word morphologically, it is hard to define explicitly what a word is . Here linguistic , define word as morpheme , the smallest unit of language .  However, to be precised and coherent , word is more than a morpheme it can be simplex or complex. Second item , it’s all about words and lexemes, types and tokens, when we have a sentence that contain a number of words ; Let’s say that if we are counting where every word occurs in a sentence, regardless of whether that word has occurred before or not we call it “word tokens”. If , however we are counting a word once, we are counting “word types”. Counting this way , word tokens and word types the two are one type . A still a different way called lexemes that can be thought of as families of words that differ only in their grammatical endings or forms. The third one is the most important questions that can be asked “why do languages have morphology?”. One reason for having morphology is to form new lexemes from old ones, in other words, morphology is sometimes referred to in a larger sense or word formation, that can either change the part of speech or add substantial new meaning. Morphology has two main processes that divide word formation into derivation the formation of new lexemes, and inflection the different grammatical word forms that make lexemes. Interestingly, morphology as a whole is the study of words and word formation . In this chapter we considered what a word is and look briefly at the distinction between word tokens, word types, and lexemes.

The second chapter, it’s get down to the work of looking at some of the most common ways that new lexemes are formed: by adding prefixes and suffixes, by making up compound words, and by changing the category of words without changing the words themselves. Also it concentrates on how words are structured in items of both their forms and their meanings. Many examples are token from English and other languages. In this chapter, I learned that  it exist common ways of creating  new lexemes , beyond what we’ve seen in the first chapter , this one contain basic analysis to learn how to segment words into morphemes and how to formulate word formation rules and how to determine the structure of words. In addition, the main processes that we’re based on: derivation , affixation, compounding, conversion,  coinage, blending, and backformation. Briefly, there is a number of ways in which new words maybe formed in languages. Affixation is a word formation rules that explicit the categorical, semantic and phonological requirements of particular affixes. Similarly, compound words or bound bases have internal structure that can be represented in trees. Also conversion , a shift in the category, of a lexeme with no accompanying change in form. Finally, a number of forms of word formation that I mentioned before : coinage, blending , clipping , backformation play a minor role.