morphology (n.)

The branch of GRAMMAR which studies the STRUCTURE or FORMS of WORDS, primarily through the use of the MORPHEME construct. It is traditionally distinguished from SYNTAX, which deals with the RULES governing the combination of words in SENTENCES. It is generally divided into two fields: the study of INFLECTIONS (inflectional morphology) and of WORD-FORMATION (lexical or derivational morphology) – a distinction which is sometimes accorded theoretical status (split morphology). When emphasis is on the technique of analyzing words into morphemes, particularly as practiced by American STRUCTURALIST linguists in the 1940s and 1950s, the term morphemics is used. Morphemic analysis in this sense is part of a SYNCHRONIC linguistic study; morphological analysis is the more general term, being applied to DIACHRONIC studies as well.

Morphological analysis may take various forms. One approach is to make a DISTRIBUTIONAL study of the morphemes and morphemic variants occurring in words (the analysis of morphotactic arrangements), as in ITEM-AND ARRANGEMENT MODELS of description. Another approach sets up morphological processes or operations, which see the relationships between word forms as one of replacement (e.g. replace the /eI/ of take with the  of took), as in ITEM-AND PROCESS models.

In early GENERATIVE linguistics, morphology and syntax are not seen as two separate LEVELS; the syntactic RULES of grammar apply to the structure of words, as they do to PHRASES and sentences, and morphological notions emerge only at the point where the output of the syntactic component has to be given a PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION (via the MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL rules). Natural morphology (NM) is an approach which aims to describe and explain UNIVERSAL tendencies in word-formation (such as the preference for deriving NOUNS from VERBS, rather than the reverse). Prosodic morphology is a theory of how morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form interact. In affixal (as opposed to non-affixal) morphology, the only permissible morphological operation is the combining of affixes and stems. Morphologically driven processes have become increasingly recognized within generative linguistics in recent years; for example, morphological features play a central role in the MINIMALIST PROGRAMME. Examples such as refer and deceive have also fuelled a debate between morpheme-based and word-based views of morphology: because -fer and -ceive are not independent morphemes, it is unclear how such words can best be handled, whether through the use of regular affixing processes (as in morpheme-based approaches) or not.