Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.) While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word-formation in English. They intuit that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is 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.

“Morphology (linguistics)” is strongly related to:

Fusional language Realizational morphology Grammatical case Morpheme-based morphology Syntax Bound morpheme Lexeme Pāṇini Affix Descriptive marker Righthand head rule Syntactic hierarchy Lexical Markup Framework Distributed morphology Double-marking language Zero-marking language Root morpheme Nonconcatenative morphology Unpaired word Bracketing paradox Morphology (folkloristics) Head-marking language Dependent-marking language Uninflected word Word formation Allomorph Morphological typology Kwakiutl Medical terminology Lexicology Lemma (linguistics) Isolating language English personal pronouns Agreement (linguistics) Phonotactics Derivation (linguistics) Superlative Agglutinative language Reduplication Compound (linguistics)

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