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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.
Morphology of a male skeleton shrimp, Caprella mutica Morphology in biology is the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features. [1]This includes aspects of the outward appearance (shape, structure, color, pattern, size), i.e. external morphology (or eidonomy), as well as the form and structure of internal parts like bones and organs, i.e. internal ...
For example, in the word quirkiness, the root is quirk, but the stem is quirky, which has two morphemes. Moreover, some pairs of affixes have identical phonological form but different meanings. For example, the suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g. sell ⇒ seller) or inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). Such morphemes are called ...
Morphology (biology), the study of the form or shape of an organism or part thereof; Morphology (folkloristics), the structure of narratives such as folk tales; Morphology (linguistics), the study of the structure and content of word forms; Morphology (sociology), the analysis of the typical social form taken by human relations and practices
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).
Affixes are bound by definition. [5] English language affixes are almost exclusively prefixes or suffixes: pre-in "precaution" and -ment in "shipment". Affixes may be inflectional, indicating how a certain word relates to other words in a larger phrase, or derivational, changing either the part of speech or the actual meaning of a word.
Grammatical categories are indicated by word order (for example, inversion of verb and subject for interrogative sentences) or by bringing in additional words (for example, a word for "some" or "many" instead of a plural inflection like English -s). Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are expressed by other words.
Another form of nonconcatenative morphology is known as transfixation, in which vowel and consonant morphemes are interdigitated.For example, depending on the vowels, the Arabic consonantal root k-t-b can have different but semantically related meanings.