Ask a Question
or
Create a Poll
  1. Home /
  2. Questions /
  3. Social Sciences
  4. / Linguistics
  5. / Linguistics Jargon
  6. / More Linguistics Jargon

by wickedwillie on January 24th, 2005

wickedwillie

Question

Help answer this question below.

What is morphology?

  • Like
  • Report
Share:
Other

Answers. Showing one answer.

  • by Too Much Time On My Hands on April 26th, 2005

    Too Much Time On My Hands

    Morphology is the study of how words are put together. It all revolves around things called "morphemes," which I'll try to explain:

    Words are composed of morphemes. A morpheme is basically the smallest possible unit of meaning in a language.

    Words can consist of one morpheme (e.g. "the". You can't break the word "the" down any further without it losing all its sense.)
    Words can consist of several morphemes (e.g. "precooked" can be divided into "pre" (before) "cook" (you know what "cook" means!) and "ed" (indicates past tense))
    As you can see in the example "precooked," some morphemes can stand on their own as words, like "cook". Others do not occur alone and can only be attached to other parts, like "pre-" or "-ed." We speak of free vs. bound morphemes when we make this distinction.

    Some morphemes are "lexical" in that they mostly bring dictionary-definition-style meaning to the word. Others serve grammatical functions like indicating past tense or plural, but don't really have their own "meaning." Morphology is the fascinating study of how different languages each put these pieces together in different ways to make their words. Innovations occur over time. For example, the word "hamburger" comes from German. Hamburg (city in Germany) + -er (suffix you add to describe someone/something from Hamburg). After the word was adopted into English, we divided it differently: Hamburg/er became ham/burger, probably because we recognized "ham" as an English morpheme despite hamburgers not containing ham. So we invented the new morpheme "burger" which is now used in other words like "cheeseburger" or "veggieburger."

    Comments

    No comments. Post one | Permalink

Want to attach an image to your answer? Click here.

Did this answer your question? If not, then ask a new question or create a poll.

More Questions. Additional questions in this category.

You're reading What is morphology?

Follow us on Facebook!

Related Ads

Related Questions

Professionally Researched

Answerbag

a Demand Media company