Morphology is concerned with the internal structure and formation of words. The original focus of morphology in the early 19th century was the search for cross-linguistic evidence of proto-languages, while today the main focus is synchronic rather than diachronic data. (Katamba, 1993, 3) One of the key questions that morphology seeks to address is ‘how is it that speakers understand and create words in their language that they have never encountered before’?

A word isn’t necessarily the smallest meaningful unit in a language; words can often be broken down into smaller units, called morphemes. Thus morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language. Morphemes can either be free (they can stand alone, i.e. they can be a word in their own right) e.g. dog, or they can be bound (they must occur as part of a word) e.g. the plural suffix –s on dogs. Derivation and inflection are the two main operations that occur in morphology. Derivational processes build words by adding morphemes. They can either change the meaning of a word, e.g. happy → unhappy or change the word class, e.g. happy (Adjective) → happiness (Noun). Inflectional processes on the other hand don’t change the word class, instead they create grammatical forms of words. For example, in English we cannot say *He walk. We must add the morpheme –s to walk to make the grammatical sentence He walks. Some other examples of inflectional operations include tense marking on verbs and number or case marking on nouns.

Aronoff and Fudeman (2005) identify two approaches to morphological analysis: analytic and synthetic. Analytic approaches break words down into minimal units while synthetic approaches build words from minimal units. The latter is associated with theory more than methodology as it implies that the morphemes of a language are already known. There is no single unified theory of morphology; rather there are a number of standpoints that theorists take. More recent approaches include Lexical Morphology and Distributed Morphology.

While certain processes in language are purely morphological, morphology can also act as a bridge between other linguistics disciplines such as syntax and phonology. However the work done in morphology also has external applications, especially for the rapidly expanding communication technologies. Conveying meaning is a highly complex process that humans undertake with seeming ease, an ease which is not matched by the performance of machines designed to replicate such tasks. The knowledge gained from studies in morphology can play a crucial role in advancing these technologies, since the encoding of lexical meaning is more significant at the level of the morpheme rather than the word.

References

Aronoff, M & Fudeman, K 2005 What is Morphology?, Blackwell, Malden.
Katamba, F 1993, Morphology, Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Current comprehensive textbook

Spencer, A 1991, Morphological Theory: An Introduction to Word Structure in Generative Grammar, Blackwell, Oxford.

Advanced reading

Spencer, A & Zwicky, AM 1998, The Handbook of Morphology, Blackwell, Oxford.

Summary by

Elizabeth Rogers
Linguistics Program
School of English, Media Studies and Art History (EMSAH)
University of Queensland

Lara Weinglass
Linguistics Program
School of English, Media Studies and Art History (EMSAH)
University of Queensland