Morphology

Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
(1746-1832)

It’s etymology is Greek “morphs” – means “shape, form”, and morphology is the study of form or forms”

In linguistics morphology refers to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that does with words, their internal structure and how they are formed.

In linguistics a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words it is the smallest meaning full unit of the a language.

Classification of morphemes.

MORPHEME
Free
Bound

Free morpheme
Content
Function
For example: last, sad.

Bound morpheme
Derivational
Inflectional
For example:
happy + ness = happiness.
For example:
dog + s = dogs.
wait + ed = waited.

Allomorphs
Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in pronunciation but are semantically identically.
For example:
in English the plural marker –(e)s of regular nouns can be pronounced /-z/, /-s/ or /-iz/, depending on the final sound of noun’s singular form.

For example:
in English the plural marker –(e)s of regular nouns can be pronounced /-z/, /-s/ or /-iz/, depending on the final sound of noun’s singular form.
/s/ (e.g. in cats - /kate/s//),
/iz/ (e.g. in dishes - /di/∫łz// and
/z/ (e.g. in dogs - /dog/z//)