Introduction to English Morphology
Introducing Morphology What is morphology? Morphology is the study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined in the languages of the world, and the way forms of words are varied depending on how they’re used in sentences. Morpheme , linguists define a morpheme as the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning. Simple words like giraffe, wiggle, or yellow are morphemes, but so are prefixes like re- and pre- and suffixes like -ize and –er. There’s far more to be said about morphemes but for now we can use the term morpheme to help us come up with a more precise and coherent definition of word. Word define as one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language. Words that consist of only one morpheme is simple or simplex words. Words that are made up of more than one morpheme are called complex . Words and lexemes, types and tokens It’s useful to have some special terms for how we count words . Let’s say that if we are counting every...
