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Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify a verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.
The etymology of the word "morphology" is from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ), meaning "form", and λόγος (lógos), meaning "word, study, research". [2] [3]While the concept of form in biology, opposed to function, dates back to Aristotle (see Aristotle's biology), the field of morphology was developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1790) and independently by the German anatomist ...
Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb or the number, grammatical gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to ...
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. A morphological pattern usually references a prototypical class of inflectional forms, e.g. ring as per sing.
The notion of the lexeme is central to morphology, [2] the basis for defining other concepts in that field. For example, the difference between inflection and derivation can be stated in terms of lexemes: Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms. Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme.
Therefore, morphology in synthetic languages is more important than syntax. Most Indo-European languages are moderately synthetic. There are two subtypes of synthesis, according to whether morphemes are clearly differentiable or not. These subtypes are agglutinative and fusional (or inflectional or flectional in older terminology).
In the second half of the 19th century, many linguists believed that there is a natural cycle of language evolution: function words of the isolating type are glued to their head-words, so that the language becomes agglutinative; later morphs become merged through phonological processes, and what comes out is an inflectional language; finally ...
In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have a high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes, including derivational and inflectional morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one ...