What is morphology? An easy answer would be: “It is a field of linguistics!” But it is far more complex then this reply reveals. The field of morphology studies and analyses the form of words by factorizing them into morphemes. These morphemes are the smallest units the word can be divided in. But what is the smallest unit of a word? This could also be a letter. There is one word missing, which makes the definition complete, namely ‘meaning’. A proper definition of the term can be found in the OALD: “Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning that a word can be divided into (827).” Words and morphemes are linguistic signs but even though the morpheme is considered a meaningful unit does not mean that every morpheme can be a word...
Contents
1. Introduction on Morphology
2. Inflection
2.1 What is Inflectional Morphology?
2.2 Grammatical Categories
2.3 The Inflected Word Classes
2.3.1 Nouns and Verbs
2.3.2 Adjectives and Numerals
2.4 Irregularities of Inflection
2.4.1 Suppletition and Portmanteau Morphemes
2.4.2 Zero-Allomorphs and Vowel Change
3. Derivation
3.1 What is Derivation?
3.2 Derivation via Affixation
3.4 Derivation without Affixation
4. Inflection versus Derivation
4.1 Distinctions
4.1.1 Stem versus Base
4.1.2 Change of the Lexical Meaning
4.1.3 Syntactical versus Lexical Function
4.1.4 “Listedness”
4.1.5 The Position of Derivational and Inflectional Affixes
4.1.6 The Number of Affixes, Limitations and Frequency
4.2 Similarities
4.2.1 Roots
4.2.2 Suffixes
4.2.3 Irregularities
4.2.4 Inherent and Contextual Inflection versus Derivation
5. Conclusion
6. List of Sources
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