What is morphology?Morphology comes from a Greek word meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form’ and is used in linguistics to denote the study of words, both with regard to their internal structure and their combination or formation to form new or larger units.

words ‘Word’ is a term in common everyday

use but one which linguists cannot easily define.

Linguists therefore prefer other terms, referring to morphs, morphemes and lexemes when talking about ‘words’.

Types of morpheme

The free morphemes are generally also referred to as lexemes, and the bound ones as affixes.

Affixes which come in front of a free morpheme are prefixes, and those which come after are suffixes.

Inflection Bound morphemes which carry

grammatical (or functional) meaning are called inflectional affixes and their function is to create new forms of existing lexemes.

Derivation

Other affixes (which can be prefixes or suffixes) have lexical meaning and are used to create new lexemes.

Other more productive word-formation processes Derivation is one of the three major (and

most productive) types of word-formation processes visible in English. The other two most important ones are compounding and conversion.

Less productive word-formation processes

Apart from these ‘big three’, there are further ways of expanding the lexicon, but none ofthem are terribly productive in English. These are: blending, clipping, back-formation,acronyms and initializes and all involve shortening the source lexeme in some way.

Word classes

We tend to distinguish between open word classes, which include nouns, full verbs, adjectives and some adverbs, and more closed word classes to which pronouns, prepositions, determiners, modal (verb)s, auxiliaries, primary verbs, conjunctions, etc. belong.

Diagram of morpheme