morphology linguistics

morphology linguistics

The Fascinating Study of Morphology in Linguistics

1. Introduction to Morphology and its Significance in Linguistics

The grammatical review of a language with such studies considers: the relationships between words in the same sentence and between words in two or more sentences (especially relatives); the several ways in which the transformed words of one sound may be derived from other sound plus one of these derived sets; the evidence of empirical rules or tradition about what are admissible and possible transformations; the evidence of morphological data about the forms of possible transformations; the evidence of empirical evidence of sense relativity constraints upon combinations of morphemes.

Morphology, as part of a structuralist view in linguistic modelling, studies the formation, structure, and relationships of words (lexical parts of speech). It investigates both relationships among words and various manifestations of relationships between words and their ultimate building-blocks, i.e. morphemes. There are two contrasting approaches to linguistic study. Phonological studies describe and analyze a language independently of semantics and grammar and with an emphasis upon communicative function. These studies consider the language as a ‘system’. Morphological and syntactic studies, on the other hand, using the phonological insight, describe and analyze words and make use of language function, but its main emphasis is upon grammar. These studies utilize the word as the smallest informative unit and are designed as a language system within the dialect.

2. Theoretical Foundations of Morphology: Morphemes and Word Formation Processes

Where is the word in the study of language? For most people, and for most of the history of linguistic study, the answer seems clear: the largest unit is the word. Word list-making in one form or another shapes a wide range of language (and linguistic) activities, from dictionaries, word-based language lessons, and memory exercises, to the discussion of political language, language change, legal meanings, and artful language use. While some grammatical categories have arisen as linguistic issues in their own right, such as case, aspect, and tense, nearly all of contemporary linguistics is concerned in one way or another with word-related phenomena. While phonology, or the study of speech-sounds, originally focused on phones (i.e., variants of particular speech-sounds), around the 1900s Ferdinand de Saussure named the new, word-related field “phonologie” or “sound system”. Over the next two decades, with the exception of members of the Prague School, Selkirk, and a few other scholars, most students of language structure agreed that words are a paradigmatic component of language structure: a word is a crucial, delineated, and distinguishable unit, which serves as food for thought, a nucleus for mentation, and a synecdoche for many different kinds of literature, speech, and thought.

3. Analyzing Morphological Patterns in Different Languages

Conflicting demands and constraints must be reconciled if morphology is to be properly understood. Linguistic data must be acknowledged and explained, but theories will be more satisfactory the greater the number of different languages that they can handle. There is always a danger of catering to one or a small subset of the available empirical data. Theoretical abstraction may be equally misleading. Linguistics cannot sacrifice realism for the sake of other values. Any study must reflect the originality of the world’s languages. Be it descriptive, theoretical, or computational, morphological research must give more than an account of the linguist’s introspective state and purely structural generalization. These are simply another way of saying that morphology must be properly understood in its linguistic context. At the same time, a valuable theory of morphology must correlate with more abstract, rule-based models of morphophonemics and morphosyntax. As productivity and default processes make clear, there are no clear-cut divides between levels of theoretical abstraction. Moreover, smaller, descriptive generalizations typically are better motivated within larger, more comprehensive frameworks.

In order to understand how a language works and to determine how it differs from other languages, linguists analyze the patterns that form its words. This is the study of morphology. Different languages use different rules to govern how words can be formed, and the number of ways that a word can be modified is almost infinite. The rich and fascinating study of morphology is considered essential to a theory of generative grammar because it provides a unique window on the nature of linguistic competence. It is closely concerned with the mental computation of words in each language, imposes significant design requirements on a grammar, and presents difficult problems for data modeling and acquisition research. Whether computational, psycholinguistic, or acquisition-oriented, work in morphology must balance competing demands of complexity, coverage, and abstraction – demands that any theory of language, and the grammatical architecture in particular, would be wise to satisfy.

4. Applications of Morphology in Language Teaching and Natural Language Processing

The study of different aspects of language can provide teachers with opportunities to analyze and evaluate various teaching methods with a strong foundation of knowledge. Unfortunately, grammar provides tools to resolve learning and processing problems that students often encounter when studying a foreign language. Some of these problems are related to word forms, which fall under the field of word formation (or morphology), and the meanings of these forms, which belong to the field of dictionaries and lexical semantics. Additionally, the process of translation requires knowledge of these words, and translation cannot be done accurately if the words cannot be reconstructed in the target language. Even a translator must search for a deep interpretation of the forms and meanings of words in both the original and target languages.

The goal of this section is to present how the study of morphology can have practical consequences in the study of language as well as other areas. Based on the relationship between morphology and some aspects of grammatical competence, the first section summarized some applied fields that derive from studying morphology in general. I will now outline how we perceive the consistencies between word composition and certain learning and processing problems, as well as the potential capabilities that students could develop. It is important to emphasize that future teachers should receive a solid linguistic training in order to effectively teach a second language.