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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).
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.
A morphome is a function in linguistics which is purely morphological or has an irreducibly morphological component. The term is particularly used by Martin Maiden [1] following Mark Aronoff's identification of morphomic functions and the morphomic level—a level of linguistic structure intermediate between and independent of phonology and syntax.
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.
Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes.
In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression, while a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. [1] A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, and a free morpheme is a type of free form. [2]
The basic principle of Distributed Morphology is that there is a single generative engine for the formation of both complex words and complex phrases: there is no division between syntax and morphology and there is no Lexicon in the sense it has in traditional generative grammar.