The Morphology

Definition: The branch of linguistics that studies the origin and development of words and other linguistic forms. Examples of areas that are studied include the earliest origins of a word, how its meanings and connotations have changed, the meanings and origins of its component parts, whether and how it has spread to other languages, and how its meaning or use has been influenced by other words. The history of a word also is called its etymology.

Examples:Many dictionaries include brief etymologies of words. The dictionary etymologies of the English "algebra" and the Spanish álgebra indicate that they came from a Latin word derived from the Arabic al-jabr. A longer etymology would indicate how the Arabic word originally was a medical term referring to the setting of bones, and that it came to refer in a broader sense to the concept of restoring what was broken.

In present-day linguistics, the term 'morphology' refers to the study of the internal structure of words, and of the systematic form-meaning correspondences between words. . . .

"The notion 'systematic' in the definition of morphology given above is important. For instance, we might observe a form difference and a corresponding meaning difference between the English noun ear and the verb hear. However, this pattern is not systematic: there are no similar word pairs, and we cannot form new English verbs by adding h- to a noun."
(Geert E. Booij, The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology, 2nd ed., Oxford Univ. Press, 2007)


"For English, [morphology] means devising ways of describing the properties of such disparate items asa, horse, took, indescribable, washing machine, andantidisestablishmentarianism. A widely recognized approach divides the field into two domains: lexicalor derivational morphology studies the way in which new items of vocabulary can be built up out of combinations of elements (as in the case of in-describ-able); inflectional morphology studies the ways words vary in their form in order to express a grammatical contrast (as in the case of horses, where the ending marks plurality)."
(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003)


"The distinction between words and lexemes provides the basis for the division ofmorphology into two branches: inflectional morphology and lexical word-formation.

"Inflectional morphology deals with the inflectional forms of various lexemes. It has something of the character of an appendix to the syntax, the major component of the grammar. Syntax tells us when a lexeme may or must carry a certain inflectional property, while inflectional morphology tells us what form it takes when it carries that inflectional property.

"Lexical word-formation, by contrast, is related to the dictionary. It describes the processes by which new lexical bases are formed and the structure of complex lexical bases, those composed of more than one morphological element. The traditional term is simply 'word-formation.'"
(Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002)