por What is morphology?
The morphology It is a discipline of linguistics in charge of the study of the internal structure of words, the rules for their formation and the different ways in which they are related to other words of the same language. In this sense, the term morphology is composed of two particles or morphemes.
The first is -morph (form) and the second is -ology (branch of knowledge). Thus, it means «branch of knowledge concerning forms.» This word is generally attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who coined it in the early 19th century in the realm of biology.
In this area, morphology studies the shape and structure of organisms. In geology it refers to the study of the configuration and evolution of the forms of the Earth.
In linguistics, morphology studies the mental system involved in word formation; It is the branch that studies words, their internal structure and their formation processes.
What is morphology used for?
Morphology, like the other branches of the linguistic discipline, serves to discover the underlying mechanisms in the different language systems. In his particular case, the internal structure and the rules of formation of the lexicon of each language are explained.
Thus, it has been noticed that in some languages the use of morphology to include complex meanings in a single word is much more elaborate than in others.
For example, in the Greenlandic language tusaanngitsuusaartuaannarsiinnaanngivipputit is a single word that means «you just can’t pretend not to be listening all the time.»
Also, compound words in English that combine a verb and its object (such as scarecrow) are quite rare. Instead, they are a basic and fairly general pattern in French and other Romance languages.
English and German tend to have the nucleus on the right, as in the word «doll».home” (doll’s House). However, Italian and other Romance languages often have the nucleus on the left, as in the word «coffeelatte” (coffee with milk).
Despite this variation, morphology is an aspect of the grammar of all languages, and in some it rivals syntax in the expressive power it allows.
Morphology classification
inflectional morphology
Inflectional morphology is the study of the processes (such as affixation) that distinguish the forms of words in certain parts of speech.
Prototypical inflectional categories include number, tense, person, case, gender, and others. In general, these produce different forms of the same word instead of different words.
Furthermore, inflectional categories do not alter the basic meaning expressed by a word or lexeme, they simply add specifications to it or emphasize certain aspects of its meaning.
Therefore, sheet and sheets, write and written, or teacher and teacher do not have separate entries in dictionaries. «Leaves,» for example, has the same basic meaning as leaf, but the morpheme «s» adds the notion of plurality.
The different grammatical forms that a word has can represent various types of phenomena:
They can manifest particular properties of certain classes of words. For example, in Spanish, the noun manifests the gender and the number (actor/actors, actress/actresses).
They represent syntactic relationships. An example of this is the agreement in gender and number of the adjective with the noun (la casa blanca/ las casas blancas).
They show sentence properties. A specific case of this is the tense and aspect in the verbal inflection (for example: #en eso tiempo, nos bañábaWe are in the river»).
derivative morphology
Derivative morphology deals with the processes of formation of new lexemes or words. These processes often involve the systematic modification of a base or root.
In general, the most widespread technique for derivation is affixation. For example, In Spanish, prefixes or suffixes are used: honest, deshonesty, honestmind. However, in other languages there are infixes, interfixes and circumcise.
In addition to affixation, there are other mechanisms such as reduplication, internal modification or rearrangement of consonants and vowels, or omission of segments.
examples
Languages have a wide variety of morphological processes available for the creation of words and their various forms.
However, there is variation regarding which morphological processes are available, how often they are used, and what kind of information can be encoded in these processes.
Broadly speaking, languages can be classified based on their word-building properties and the use of different affixation processes. Thus, two large types of languages are distinguished: analytical and synthetic.
The former have sentences composed entirely of free morphemes, where each word consists of a single morpheme. On the other hand, the synthetic ones allow the inclusion of two or more locked morphemes.
A morpheme is the smallest unit of semantic meaning. This can be free as «sun» «house» or «time» (they have meaning on their own); or locked, like the plural “s” or the suffix “dis” (they must be accompanied: loroyes – disequal).
Below are some examples.
Spanish
Spanish is a synthetic language, but of an inflectional or fusional type. It is characterized because the same morpheme contains several types of grammatical information:
spokeeither (suffix «o»: first person singular, present tense, indicative mood).
spoketo (suffix “a”: third person singular, present tense, indicative mood).
spokeeither (suffix «o» with accent: first person singular, past tense, indicative mood).
Swahili
Swahili is an agglutinative language, a type of synthetic language in which the morphemes remain unchanged:
ninasoma (ni/yo – na/present tense – soma/read): I read.
unasoma (u/you – na/present tense – soma/read): you read.
nilisoma: (ni/yo – li/past tense – soma/read): I read.
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin Chinese is an analytical language. These types of languages usually have stricter and more elaborate syntactic rules.
Furthermore, the words do not have morphological marks that show their role in the sentence. Therefore, word order tends to be very important.
一个男孩 yī ge nánhái (literally “a [entidad de] male child»): a child.
四个男孩 sì ge nánhái (literally, “four [entidad de] male child”): four children.