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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 .
Unlike derivational suffixes, English derivational prefixes typically do not change the lexical category of the base (and are so called class-maintaining prefixes). Thus, the word do, consisting of a single morpheme, is a verb, as is the word redo, which consists of the prefix re-and the base root do.
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.
Adding a prefix to the beginning of an English word changes it to a different word. For example, when the prefix un-is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy. The word prefix is itself made up of the stem fix (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix pre-(meaning "before"), both of which are derived from Latin roots.
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. [1] Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes.
The prefix m-then agrees with the adjective m-dogo. The verb agreement is different simply because the verb agreement for class 1 is a-rather than m-. The second example has the prefix ki-because the noun basket is part of class 7. Class 7 has the same prefix form for nouns, adjectives and verbs. [2]
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).
Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language.A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes and even smaller elements known as phonemes, or distinguishing sounds.