Introduction to Morphology

The definition of Morphology

Morphology is Greek and is a makeup of Morph is “shape, form” and –ology which mean is “the study of something”. Morphemes are the smallest meaning unit of language. Morphemes consists of free morphemes and bound morphemes. Free morphemes are these which can stand alone as words of language, whereas bound morphmes must be attched to other morphemes. Morphology is the study of the combination of morphemes. Morphology also is the study of systematic covariation in the form and meaning of words. Morphology is the study of the combination of morphemes to yield words. So, according to Oxford dictionary Morphology is the form of words, studied as branch of linguistic. Therefore, According to us Morphology is the study of linguistic that learns about forms and morpheme. Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. morphology is both the oldest and one of the youngest subdisciplines of grammar.

Morphology in different languages

Morphology is not equally prominent in all (spoken) languages. What one

language expresses morphologically may be expressed by a separate word

or left implicit in another language. there are many languages that make more use of morphology

than English. For instance, as we saw in (1.1), Sumerian uses morphology to

distinguish between ‘he went’ and ‘I went’, and between ‘he went’ and ‘he

went to him’, where English must use separate words. Linguists sometimes use the terms analytic and synthetic to describe

the degree to which morphology is made use of in a language. Languages

like Yoruba, Vietnamese or English, where morphology plays a relatively

modest role, are called analytic. Consider the following example sentences

Vietnamese

Hai d-ú.a bo? nhau là ta.i gia-d-ình thàng ch.ng.

two individual leave each.other be because.of family guy husband

‘They divorced because of his family.’

The distinction between analytic and (poly)synthetic languages is not

a bipartition or a tripartition, but a continuum, ranging from the most

radically isolating to the most highly polysynthetic languages.

The goals of morphological research

Morphological research aims to describe and explain the morphological

patterns of human languages. It is useful to distinguish four more specific

sub-goals of this endeavour: elegant description, cognitively realistic

description, system-external explanation and a restrictive architecture for

description.

Elegant description. 

All linguists agree that morphological patterns

(just like other linguistic patterns) should be described in an elegant and

intuitively satisfactory way. Thus, morphological descriptions should

contain a rule saying that English nouns form their plural by adding -s,

rather than simply listing the plural forms for each noun in the dictionary

(abbot, abbots; ability, abilities; abyss, abysses; accent, accents; …)The main

criterion for elegance is generality. generalizations can be formulated in various ways,

and linguists often disagree in their judgements of what is the most elegant

description.

Cognitively realistic description.

should express the same generalizations about grammatical systems that the speakers’ cognitive apparatus has unconsciously arrived at. We know that the speakers’

knowledge of English not only consists of lists of singulars and plurals,

but comprises a general rule of the type ‘add -s to a singular form to get

a plural noun’. But they do have this

ability: if you tell an English speaker that a certain musical instrument is

called a duduk, they know that the plural is (or can be) duduks. Linguists sometimes reject proposed descriptions

because they seem cognitively implausible, and sometimes they collaborate

with psychologists and neurologists and take their research results into

account.

System-external explanation.

most facts about linguistic patterns are historical accidents and as such cannot be

explained. The fact that the English plural is formed by adding -s is a good

example of such a historical accident. There is nothing necessary about

plural -s: Hungarian plurals are formed by adding -k, Swedish plurals

add -r, Hebrew plurals add -im or -ot, and so on.

And as a first step, we must find out which morphological

patterns are universal. Clearly, the s-plural is not universal, and, as we

saw in the preceding section, not even the morphological expression of

the plural is universal – Yoruba is an example of a language that lacks

morphological plurals.

This explanation (whatever its merits) is an example of a system-external

explanation in the sense that it refers to facts outside the language system:

the usefulness of number distinctions in speech.

A restrictive architecture for description.

linguists try to construct an architecture for description

(also called grammatical theory) that all language-particular descriptions

must conform to. For instance, it has been observed that rules by

which constituents are fronted to the beginning of a sentence can affect

syntactic constituents. This restriction on fronting (which seems to hold for all languages that have

such a fronting rule) follows automatically if fronting rules (such as whatfronting)

and morpheme-combination rules (such as compounding, which

yields cheeseboard from cheese and board) are separated from each other in the

descriptive architecture. Many linguists assume that the architecture of grammar is innate – it is the

same for all languages because it is genetically fixed for the human species.

The innate part of speakers’ grammatical knowledge is also called Universal

Grammar. fronting rules are part of the syntactic component, and morphemecombinations

are part of morphology, and syntax and morphology are

separate. It is a curious observation on the sociology of science that currently most

linguists seem to be concerned either with system-external explanation

or with formulating an architecture for grammatical description, but not

with both goals simultaneously.