As you’ve learned so far in this book, morphology is concerned with the ways in which words are formed in the languages of the world. Syntax, in contrast, is concerned with identifying the rules that allow us to combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences. Morphology and syntax, then, are generally concerned with different levels of linguistic organization. Morphologists look at processes of lexeme formation and inflection such as affixation, compounding, reduplication, and the like. Syntacticians are concerned, among other things, with phrase structure and movement rules, and rules concerning the interpretation of anaphors and pronouns. Nevertheless, there are many ways in which morphology and syntax interact.

Inflectional morphology is defined as morphology that carries grammatical meaning; as such it is relevant to syntactic processes. Case-marking, for example, serves to identify the syntactic function of an NP in a sentence. Inflectional markers like tense and aspect-affixes identify clauses of certain types, for example, finite or infinitive, conditional or subjunctive. Person and number markers often figure in agreement between adjectives and the nouns they modify, or between verbs and their subjects or objects. In some sense, inflection can be viewed as part of the glue that holds sentences together.

We will first look in more detail at several types of verbal morphology that affect sentence structure by changing what is called the valency of verbs. Valency concerns the number of arguments in a sentence, where arguments are noun phrases like the subject and object selected by the verb of the sentence.

We will look at the borderline between morphology and syntax. While it is usually clear to linguists which phenomena belong to which level of organization, the boundary between the two levels is not always crystal clear. There are cases in which derivational morphemes appear to attach to whole phrases, for example, or elements that seem not quite bound enough to be affixes, but not quite free enough to be viewed as independent words.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

تكريم الباحثين والمساهمين المشاركين في ندوة اليوم العالمي للّغة العربية

ندوة اللغة العربية تشهد إقامة جلسة بحثية تسلط الضوء على دورها في العلوم الشرعية والفكرية

جمعية العميد: اللغة العربية مفتاح فهم القرآن الكريم وأحاديث أهل البيت (عليهم السلام)

العتبة العباسية المقدسة: نسعى لأن تكون اللغة العربية طليعةً لاهتمامنا عبر فعاليات علمية وأدبية مستمرة طوال العام

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

كنز غذائي على طبقك.. ماذا تفعل السبانخ بجسمك؟

ما لا يتوقعه أحد.. "سر غذائي" في الجبن الدسم

لتحسين الهضم والنوم.. هذا أفضل وقت لتناول العشاء

10 طرق بسيطة وغير مألوفة لحرق المزيد من السعرات يوميا

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

سابقة بعالم الطيران.. طائرة تقرر الهبوط بنفسها بعد ظرف طارئ

"الإنفلونزا الخارقة" تكتسح دول العالم.. وتثير قلقا كبيرا

مرحلة ما قبل الأعراض.. دواء جديد يستهدف "شرارة" الزهايمر

إزالة ثاني أكسيد الكربون من الغلاف الجوي.. ما دور المحيطات والبحار؟

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Constituent structure

A typology of word structure

Analyzing position classes

Representing word structure

Different kinds of morphemes

Morphemes Definition of “morpheme”

Analyzing word structure

Mirror in nominal morphology

Appendix 2: Hapax legomena from the Cobuild corpus

Appendix 1: 20th century neologisms from the OED

Morphological Productivity Structural Constraints in English Derivation Conclusion

Verbal derivation and the separation hypothesis