Morphology

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of morphemesand other units of meaning in a language like words, affixes, and parts of speech and intonation/stress, implied context (words in a lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology). Morphological typologyrepresents a way of classifying languages according to the ways by which morphemes are used in a language —from the analytic that use only isolated morphemes, through the agglutinative ("stuck-together") and fusional languages that use bound morphemes (affixes), up to the polysynthetic, which compress lots of separate morphemes into single words.
While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules (grammars). For example,English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related — differentiated only by theplurality morpheme "-s," which is only found bound to nouns, and is never separate. Speakers of English (a fusional language) recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher asdish is to dishwasher (in one sense). The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
A language like Chinese instead uses unbound ("free") morphemes, but which depend on tone, post-phrase affixes, and word order to convey meaning.
In the Chinese languages, these are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. Beyond the agglutinative languages, a polysynthetic language like Chukchi will have words composed of many morphemes: The word "təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən" is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən, that can be glossed 1.SG.SUBJ-great-head-hurt-PRES.1, meaning 'I have a fierce headache.' The morphology of such languages allow for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, just as the grammars of the language key the usage and understanding of each morpheme.
History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskritmorphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a Constituency Grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marāḥ al-arwāḥ and Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas‘ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE.[1]
The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.[2]
Fundamental concepts
Lexemes and word forms
The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most important one in morphology. The first sense of "word", the one in which dog and dogs are "the same word", is called a lexeme. The second sense is called word form. We thus say that dog and dogsare different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma, or citation form.
Prosodic word vs. morphological word
Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of 'NOUN-PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASE2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language.[3] In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three word English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many languages. But affixation for semantic relations in Kwak'wala differs dramatically (from the viewpoint of those whose language is not Kwak'wala) from such affixation in other languages for this reason: the affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwakw'ala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[4]
A central publication on this topic is the recent volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2007), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic-phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory.
Inflection vs. word formation
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog catcher or dishwasher provide an example of a word formation rule. Informally, word formation rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
There is a further distinction between two kinds of word formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form; dog catcher is therefore a compound, because bothdog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right before the compounding process has been applied, and are subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affixderives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend.
The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.
Word formation is a process, as we have said, where you combine two complete words, whereas with inflection you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, we use ‘go’ with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, whereas for third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we use ‘goes’. So this ‘-es’ is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word’s grammatical category whereas in the process of inflection the word never changes its grammatical category.
Paradigms and morphosyntax
A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person (1st., 2nd., 3rd.), number (singular vs. plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and possessive). See English personal pronouns for the details.
The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent andindependent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.
An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word formation is not. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntaxand morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word formation or compounding.
Allomorphy
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs ascat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s affixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen,goose/geese, and sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases considered "regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", are called allomorphy.
Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by thephonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃəz]results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.
Lexical morphology
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically conceived, is the collection oflexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.
Models
There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the distinctions above in different ways. These are,
 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.
Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very strong, it is not absolute.
Morpheme-based morphology
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the rootand the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[5] In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest (and most naïve) form, this way of analyzing word forms treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement. More modern and sophisticated approaches seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenative, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for Item-and-Arrangement theories and similar approaches.
Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms (cf. Beard 1995 for an overview and references):
1. Baudoin’s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the same status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES.
2. Bloomfield’s SIGN BASE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.
3. Bloomfield’s LEXICAL MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: The morphemes, affixes and roots alike, are stored in the lexicon.
Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian. (cf. Bloomfield 1933 and Charles F. Hockett1947). For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but it was not meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes aremeaning elements, not form elements. For him, there is a morpheme plural, with the allomorphs -s, -en, -ren etc. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, these two views are mixed in unsystematic ways, so that a writer may talk about "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s" in the same sentence, although these are different things.
Lexeme-based morphology
Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.
Word-based morphology
Word-based morphology is (usually) a Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogicalrules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where olderfollows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation).
Morphological typology
In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily separable morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.
Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this classification is not at all clear cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of these types, and some fit in more than one way. A continuum of complex morphology of language may be adapted when considering languages.
The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.
The reader should also note that the classical typology mostly applies to inflectional morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word formation. Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).
References
1. ^ Arabic Morphology and Phonology
2. ^ Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort "Morphologie" ("for the science of word formation, I choose the term 'morphology'",Mémoires Acad. Impériale 7/1/7, 35)
3. ^ Formerly known as Kwakiutl, Kwak'wala belongs to the Northern branch of the Wakashan language family. "Kwakiutl" is still used to refer to the tribe itself, along with other terms.
4. ^ Example taken from Foley 1998, using a modified transcription. This phenomenon of Kwak'wala was reported by Jacobsen as cited in van Valin and La Polla 1997.
5. ^ The existence of words like appendix and pending in English does not mean that the English word depend is analyzed into a derivational prefix de- and a root pend. While all those were indeed once related to each other by morphological rules, this was so only in Latin, not in English. English borrowed the words from French and Latin, but not the morphological rules that allowed Latin speakers to combine de- and the verb pendere 'to hang' into the derivative dependere.
Further reading
 Anderson, Stephen R. (1992). A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge: CUP.
 Aronoff, Mark. (1993). "Morphology by Itself". Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Aronoff, Mark. (2009). "Morphology: an interview with Mark Aronoff". ReVEL, v. 7, n. 12, ISSN 1678-8931.
 Beard, Robert. (1995). Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-2471-5.
 Bauer, Laurie. (2003). Introducing linguistic morphology (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-87840-343-4.
 Bauer, Laurie. (2004). A glossary of morphology. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP.
 Bubenik, Vit. (1999). An introduction to the study of morphology. LINCON coursebooks in linguistics, 07. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3-89586-570-2.
 Dixon, R. M. W. and Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (Eds). (2007). Word: A cross-linguistic typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
 Foley, William A. (1998). "Symmetrical Voice Systems and Precategoriality in Philippine Languages". Workshop: Voice and Grammatical Functions in Austronesian. University of Sydney.
 Haspelmath, Martin. (2002). Understanding morphology. London: Arnold (co-published by Oxford University Press). ISBN 0-340-76025-7 (hb); ISBN 0340760265 (pbk).
 Katamba, Francis. (1993). Morphology. Modern linguistics series. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10101-5 (hb). ISBN 0-312-10356-5 (pbk).
 Matthews, Peter. (1991). Morphology (2nd ed.). CUP. ISBN 0-521-41043-6 (hb). ISBN 0-521-42256-6 (pbk).
 Mel'čuk, Igor A. (1993–2000). Cours de morphologie générale, vol. 1-5. Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
 Mel'čuk, Igor A. (2006). Aspects of the theory of morphology. Berlin: Mouton.
 Scalise, Sergio. (1983). Generative Morphology, Dordrecht, Foris.
 Singh, Rajendra and Stanley Starosta (eds). (2003). Explorations in Seamless Morphology. SAGE Publications. ISBN 0-7619-9594-3(hb).
 Spencer, Andrew. (1991). Morphological theory: an introduction to word structure in generative grammar. No. 2 in Blackwell textbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-16143-0 (hb); ISBN 0-631-16144-9 (pb)
 Spencer, Andrew and Zwicky, Arnold M. (Eds.) (1998). The handbook of morphology. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18544-5.
 Stump, Gregory T. (2001). Inflectional morphology: a theory of paradigm structure. No. 93 in Cambridge studies in linguistics. CUP.ISBN 0-521-78047-0 (hb).
 van Valin, Robert D., and LaPolla, Randy. (1997). Syntax : Structure, Meaning And Function. CUP
 Zuckermann, Ghil'ad. (2009). Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns, Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2: 40-67.

Sources
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics)
Morphology (linguistics) - Definition

Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. Words are at the interface among phonology, syntax andsemantics (Spencer / Zwicky).
There are many current approaches to morphology. For expository purposes, this article will describe the phenomena in a fairly traditional way: treating words as combinations of discrete meaningful units (morphemes) put together by concatenation. A contemporary morphologist would call this a "morpheme-based" theory; alternatives are lexeme-based morphology and word-based morphology.
The components of a word form are called morphemes. Word formation rules describe how to selectmorphemes from the lexicon and to combine them.
Important concepts:
 Inflection
 Derivation
 Compounding (examples)
Morphemes make up words and are the smallest units of grammar: roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Native speakers recognize the morphemes as grammatically significant or meaningful. For example, "schoolyard" is made of "school" + "yard", "makes" is made of "make" + a grammatical suffix "-s", and "unhappiness" is made of "happy" with a prefix "un-" and a suffix "-ness".
Inflection occurs when a word has different forms but essentially the same meaning, and there is only a grammatical difference between them: for example, "make" and "makes". The "-s" is an inflectional morpheme.
In contrast, derivation makes a word with a clearly different meaning: such as "unhappy" or "happiness", both from "happy". The "un-" and "-ness" are derivational morphemes.
These examples also illustrate the other two kinds of morphemes, unbound (which are meaningful on their own) and bound (which have meaning when combined with another morpheme). Thus, the word "schoolyard" consists of two unbound morphemes ("school" and "yard"), while the word "makes" has one unbound ("make") and one bound, and "unhappiness" has one unbound and two bound.
A word may consist of two bound morphemes: the word "morpheme" itself illustrates this, since it consists, or traditionally consisted, of two bound morphemes ("morph" and "eme"). But as the example of "morpheme" reveals, bound morphemes may become unbound ones: "morph" has been adopted in linguistics for the phonological realization of a morpheme, and the verb "morph" was coined to describe a transition between morphological states (usually biological). A more familiar example is if we adopt the suffix "-ish" as a separate word, and use "ish" by itself to mean "somewhat, a bit, so-so". The suffix "-ism" is often applied in a similar way to mean "a system of beliefs or an ideology" (e.g. Darwinism).
A morpheme may have different realizations (morphs) in different contexts. For example, the verb morpheme "do" of English has three quite distinct pronunciations in the words "do", "does" (with suffix "-s"), and "don't" (with "-n't"). Such alternating morphs of a morpheme are called its allomorphs. Other examples are in past participles of verbs: "walked", "eaten", "drunk": one verb has a regular "-ed" allomorph, one has a less common "-en" allomorph, and one changes the vowel inside the verb. This last case is a problem for description, because you can't separate the morpheme "drink" from the morpheme for past participle. The two appear fused.
In some languages, of which Latin forms a prime example, several inflections are often fused into one phonetic form. These are calledfusional languages. For example, dominus "master" has plural domini, while domina "mistress" has plural dominae. The ending -uscontains the ideas of masculine and singular, and in addition is only used in the nominative case. In the accusative singular it isdominum, and in the genitive plural it is dominorum. It is impossible to isolate separate morphemes for case, or gender, or number. In contrast to fusional languages, agglutinative languages such as Turkish use multiple morphemes in the one word but they are all phonetically separable.
The Semitic languages show an extreme of fusion, in that word roots are often represented by fixed consonants, usually three, and their inflection and derivation is done with internal vowel patterns as well as affixes. For example, in Arabic we find kataba "he wrote", yaktubu"he writes", kaatib "writer", kitaab "book", maktab "office". All these forms use the consonant cluster KTB.
Suppletion is the replacement of a regular form by an unrelated word. In English "go" has the past tense "went", and "be" has various unrelated parts such as "am" and "was".
The term Gesamtbedeutung is used to describe the general semantic meaning of a particular morpheme, independent of grammaticalfunction. The morphemes "-ing" and "-or" (as in "eliminating" and "eliminator") may be said to share a common Gesamtbedeutung, namely that of agency.
A cranberry morpheme is one that exists only in one bound form, such as the "cran-" of "cranberry". It is unrelated to the word "cran" meaning a case of herrings, and though it actually comes from "crane" the bird, it is not at all clear why. Phonetically, the first morphemes of "gooseberry" and "raspberry" also count as cranberry morphemes, as they don't occur by themselves, but the spelling gives an obscure clue to their origin. Compare these to "blackberry", which has two obvious unbound morphemes.
See also
 affixation
 bound morpheme
 dependent-marking language
 head-marking language
 inflected language
 morphological typology
 noun case
 root morpheme
 uninflected word
Further reading
 Peter H. Matthews' Morphology (ISBN 0521422566) is a classic late 20th century introductory textbook.
References
 Francis Katamba, Morphology, Macmillan Press, 1993
 Peter H. Matthews, Morphology, 2nd Ed., Cambridge University Press, 1991.
 Andrew Spencer and Arnold M. Zwicky, The Handbook of Morphology, Blackwell, 1998

Sources
www.wordiq.com/definition/Morphology_(linguistics)

1n linguistics, morphology is the study of word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, Englishspeakers recognize that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations by virtue of the unconscious linguistic knowledge they have of the rules of word-formation processes in English. Therefore, these speakers intuit that dog is to dogs just as cat is to cats, or encyclopædia is to encyclopædias; similarly,dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules comprehended by the speaker in each case reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such patterns of word-formation across and within languages, and attempts to explicate formal rules reflective of the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini who formulated the 3,959 rules ofSanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī. The Graeco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis.
The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859: Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort "Morphologie" ("for the science of word formation, I choose the term 'morphology'", Mémoires Acad. Impériale 7/1/7, 35). It derives from the Greek words μορφή ("form") and λόγος ("explanation, account").
Fundamental concepts
Lexemes and word forms
The term "word" is ambiguous in common usage. To take up again the example of dog vs. dogs, there is one sense in which these two are the same "word" (they are both nouns that refer to the same kind of animal, differing only in number), and another sense in which they are different words (they can't generally be used in the same sentences without altering other words to fit; for example, the verbs is and are in The dog is happy and The dogs are happy).
The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most important one in morphology. The first sense of "word," the one in which dog and dogs are "the same word," is called lexeme. The second sense is called word-form. We thus say that dog and dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog-catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes; for example, they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma, or citation form.
Inflection vs. word-formation
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate two different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are calledinflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word-formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dogand dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog-catcher or dishwasher provide an example of a word-formation rule. Informally, word-formation rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
There is a further distinction between two kinds of word-formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word-formation that involves combining complete word-forms into a single compound form; dog-catcher is therefore a compound, because both dog and catcher are complete word-forms in their own right before the compounding process was applied, and are subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, whiledependent itself is derived from dépendant, the French present participle of dépendre which means "to hang down" (and is also a cognate of the English verb depend).
The distinction between inflection and word-formation is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word-formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.
Paradigms and morphosyntax
A paradigm is the complete set of related word-forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word-forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person, number, gender and case.
The inflectional categories used to group word-forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must begrammatical categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are grammatical categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreementrules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog-catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.
An important difference between inflection and word-formation is that inflected word-forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word-formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word-formation not so. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word-formation or compounding.
Allomorphy and morphophonology
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word-forms: dog is to dogs as cat is tocats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -saffixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, andsheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases considered "regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative changes to the form of a word, are called allomorphy.
There are several kinds of allomorphy. One is pure allomorphy, where the allomorphs are just arbitrary. Other, more extreme cases of allomorphy are called suppletion, where two forms related by a morphological rule cannot be explained as being related on a phonological basis: for example, the past of go is went, which is a suppletive form.
On the other hand, other kinds of allomorphy are due to the interaction between morphology and phonology. Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃəz] results. This is an example of vowel epenthesis in English. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.
The study of allomorphy that results from the interaction of morphology and phonology is called morphophonology. Many morphophonological rules fall under the category of sandhi.
Lexical morphology
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word-formation: derivation and compounding.
Models of morphology
There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the distinctions above in different ways. These are,
• 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.
Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very strong, it is not absolute.
Morpheme-based morphology
In morpheme-based morphology, word-forms are analyzed as sequences of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, andly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[1] In a word like dogs, we say thatdog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of analyzing word-forms as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement.
The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology usually think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to such an extent that very often beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable, fundamental notion of morphology, and many five-minute explanations of morphology are, in fact, five-minute explanations of morpheme-based morphology. This is, however, not so. The fundamental idea of morphology is that the words of a language are related to each other by different kinds of rules. Analyzing words as sequences of morphemes is a way of describing these relations, but is not the only way. In actual academic linguistics, morpheme-based morphology certainly has many adherents, but is by no means the dominant approach.
Applying a strictly morpheme-based model quickly leads to complications when one tries to analyze many forms of allomorphy. For example, the word dogs is easily broken into the root dog and the plural morpheme -s. The same analysis is straightforward for oxen, assuming the stem ox and a suppletive plural morpheme -en. How then would the same analysis "split up" the word geese into a root and a plural morpheme? In the same manner, how to split sheep?
Theorists wishing to maintain a strict morpheme-based approach often preserve the idea in cases like these by saying thatgeese is goose followed by a null morpheme (a morpheme that has no phonological content), and that the vowel change in the stem is a morphophonological rule. Also, morpheme-based analyses commonly posit null morphemes even in the absence of any allomorphy. For example, if the plural noun dogs is analyzed as a root dog followed by a plural morpheme-s, then one might analyze the singular dog as the root dog followed by a null morpheme for the singular.
Lexeme-based morphology
Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a word-form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word-form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word-form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word-forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.
The Item-and-Process approach bypasses the difficulties inherent in the Item-and-Arrangement approaches. Faced with a plural like geese, one is not required to assume a null morpheme: while the plural of dog is formed by affixing -s, the plural of goose is formed simply by altering the vowel in the stem.
Word-based morphology
Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-Paradigm approach. This theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word-forms, or to generate word-forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different than the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cowsreplacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). While a Word-and-Paradigm approach can explain this easily, other approaches have difficulty with phenomena such as this.
Morphological typology

In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily-separable morphemes; while others yet are fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are said to be "fused" together. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.
Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this classification is not at all clear-cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of these types. However, examined against the light of the three general models of morphology described above, it is also clear that the classification is very much biased towards a morpheme-based conception of morphology. It makes direct use of the notion of morpheme in the definition of agglutinative and fusional languages. It describes the latter as having separate morphemes "fused" together (which often does correspond to the history of the language, but not to its synchronic reality).
The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.
The reader should also note that the classical typology also mostly applies to inflectional morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word-formation. Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word-formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).
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Sources
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