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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Morphology and Word Formation

Morphology

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/mɔːˈfɒlədʒi/nounCore term

In linguistics & grammar, morphology means: The study of the internal structure of words: how they are built from smaller meaningful parts such as roots, prefixes and suffixes.

In Turkish: biçimbilim, morfoloji

How it is used

Used for the field (a course in morphology) and for the word structure of one language (Turkish morphology is very rich). Its two main parts are inflectional and derivational morphology. In biology the same word means the study of the form of living things.

Example sentences

  1. Turkish is an agglutinative language, so its morphology lets one word carry the meaning of a whole English sentence.

  2. English verb morphology is fairly simple: a regular verb has only four forms, such as walk, walks, walked and walking.

Common collocations

  • inflectional morphology
  • derivational morphology
  • rich morphology
  • morphological analysis
  • morphemeThe smallest part of a word that has its own meaning or grammatical job, such as un-, happy and -ness in unhappiness.
  • affixA piece added to a word to change its meaning or grammatical form, such as a prefix at the start (re-) or a suffix at the end (-ed).
  • inflectionA change in the form of a word, usually by adding an ending, to show grammatical information such as tense, number, person or case, without making a new word.
  • derivationThe process of making a new word from an existing one, usually by adding an affix, as when teach becomes teacher or happy becomes unhappy.
  • rootThe core part of a word that carries its basic meaning and cannot be broken into smaller meaningful parts, such as 'form' in reformation or 'kitap' in kitaplık.

More terms: Morphology and Word Formation

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