Morphology

Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. It is also known as the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages. The knowledge of morphology can be applied among the teachers to increase their vocabulary, detect the changes of word classes, know the word origins and enhances the teachers' mind to think creatively.

Morphology can helps us as a teacher to increase our vocabulary as morpheme can be combined to form a new word. As a trainee teacher, we are newly exposed to the words in a variety of contexts. At school before, morphology is not being integrated into the spelling curriculum. So now, we need to explore morphology by choose words or morpheme which will provide the most benefit for ourselves in order to create new words. Informally, word formation rules form "new words".

There are two types of word formation that are derivational and also compounding word. Compounding is a word formation process that involves combining two free morphemes to form a new word in a single compound form. For example, a free morpheme girl is combined with another free morpheme; friend will form a new single word girlfriend. Girl is a free morpheme because it is a smallest meaningful unit of sound so do the word friend. In addition, both girl and friend are complete word forms in their own right before the compounding process has been applied, and later are treated as one form.

In ordinary English spelling, compounds are sometimes spelled as single words, as in blackbird, blackboard. Sometimes the parts are connected by a hyphen, as in jig-saw and sometimes they are spelled as two words, as in chain saw, oil well. However, we are justified in classifying all such cases as compound words not considering their conventional spelling for a variety of reasons.

The second type of word formation is derivation. Derivation involves the combination of free morpheme with affixes or suffixes. The most obvious word that use this type of combination is ‘teacher', the free morpheme teach combined with suffix –er to form a new word ‘teacher'. So, a new word formed will be our new vocabulary and it can help us understand English better.

As we studied morphology, we knew that one of the advantages of learning morphology is its knowledge can help English teachers in identifying the changes of word classes. A familiar distinction is that between nouns and verbs, and there are several ways in which we can justify this in English. For example, teacher is derived by adding -er to the verb teach. When the suffix -er is added to a verb, a new noun is created. Another example is, we can form a noun happiness from the adjective happy. The word happiness is formed by adding an ending, -ness, to happy. This process is referred as derivational