Morphology

Morphology, in linguistics, is the study of the forms of words, and the ways in which words are related to other words of the same language. Formal differences among words serve a variety of purposes, from the creation of new lexical items to the indication of grammatical structure.

In lingusitics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, part of speech, intonation and stresses, or implied context. In contrast, morphologycal typology is the classification of languages according to their use of morphemes, while lexicology is the study of those words forming a language's wordstock.

There are three principal approaches to morphology and each tries to capture the distinctions above in different ways:

• Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an item-and-arrangement approach.
• Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an item-and-process approach.
• Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a word-and-paradigm approach.

While the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list are very strong, they are not absolute.

We have seen above that the forms of words can carry complex and highly structured information. Words do not serve simply as minimal signs, arbitrary chunks of sound that bear meaning simply by virtue of being distinct from one another. Some aspects of a word’s form may indicate the relation of its underlying lexeme to others (markers of derivational morphology or of compound structure), while others indicate properties of the grammatical structure within which it is found (markers of inflectional properties). All of these relations seem to be best construed as knowledge about the relations between words however: relations between whole lexemes, even when these can be regarded as containing markers of their relations to still other lexemes; and relations between word forms that realize paradigmatic alternatives built on a single lexeme’s basic stem(s) in the case of inflection.  These relations connect substantively defined classes in a way that is only partially directional in its essential nature, and the formal connections among these classes are signalled in ways that are best represented as processes relating one shape to another.