Building words: morphology

We have considered the basic building blocks of language (phonemes) and the ways in which they can be combined in speech. Our focus will be on grammar, which linguists have traditionally seen as comprising the two sub-disciplines of syntax, the arrangement of words in a sentence, and morphology, the internal structure of words, which we examine here. We begin by introducing the concept of the morpheme, which often proves a more helpful analytical tool than the word, a satisfactory definition of which proves elusive. We then review the traditional division between derivational morphology (or word formation) and inflectional morphology (the marking of grammatical categories), and look at attempts to classify languages on the basis of their morphological structure. We looked more closely at grammatical categories such as number and gender and their values, which prove extremely variable cross-linguistically and often differ greatly from those which are familiar to us as English speakers.