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In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes , which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning .
Derivational morphology often involves the addition of a derivational suffix or other affix. Such an affix usually applies to words of one lexical category (part of speech) and changes them into words of another such category. For example, one effect of the English derivational suffix -ly is to change an adjective into an adverb (slow → slowly).
In linguistics, clipping, also called truncation or shortening, [1] is word formation by removing some segments of an existing word to create a diminutive word or a clipped compound. Clipping differs from abbreviation , which is based on a shortening of the written, rather than the spoken, form of an existing word or phrase.
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. [1] Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes.
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (pl.: lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, [1] dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. [2] In English, for example, break , breaks , broke , broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme , with break as the lemma by which they are indexed.
In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().
A non-aligned morphological dictionary would represent the previous example as: (houses, house n pl ) It is possible to convert a non-aligned dictionary into an aligned dictionary. Besides trivial alignments to the left or to the right, linguistically motivated alignments which align characters to their corresponding morphemes are possible.
In the example below, 'son' and 'good' agree in nominative case because they are the subject of the sentence and at the same time they agree in gender because the ending is masculine. Likewise, 'the dog' and 'wild' share the same morphemes that show they agree in accusative case and masculine gender.