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In linguistics, morphology (mor-FOL-ə-jee [1]) is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. [2] [3] 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.
In the fields of computational linguistics and applied linguistics, a morphological dictionary is a linguistic resource that contains correspondences between surface form and lexical forms of words. Surface forms of words are those found in natural language text.
It is important to distinguish the paradigm of a lexeme from a morphological pattern. In the context of an inflecting language, an inflectional morphological pattern is not the explicit list of inflected forms.
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).
Nonconcatenative morphology is extremely well developed in the Semitic languages in which it forms the basis of virtually all higher-level word formation (as with the example given in the diagram). That is especially pronounced in Arabic , which also uses it to form approximately 41% [ 5 ] of plurals in what is often called the broken plural .
Analysis of morphology (biology), the form and structure of organisms and their specific features; Mathematical morphology, a theory and technique for analysis and processing of images and geometrical structures; Morphological dictionary, a computational linguistic resource that contains correspondences between surface form and lexical forms of ...
Other linguists have proposed similar concepts. For instance, Elly van Gelderen sees the regular patterns of linguistic change as a cycle. In the unidirectional cycles, older features are replaced by newer items. One example is grammaticalization, where a lexical item became a grammatical marker. The markers may further grammaticalize, and a ...
In linguistics, morphological leveling or paradigm leveling is the generalization of an inflection across a linguistic paradigm, a group of forms with the same stem in which each form corresponds in usage to different syntactic environments, [1] or between words. [2] The result of such leveling is a paradigm that is less varied, having fewer ...