Morphology
Morphol ogy Tata Contents: Introduction Inflection Word Formation Representation of Morphological Knowledge Morphology, in linguistics, is the study of the forms of words, and the ways in which words are related to other words of the same language. Formal differences among words serve a variety of purposes, from the creation of new lexical items to the indication of grammatical structure. Introduction If you ask most non-linguists what the primary thing is that has to be learned if one is to ‘know’ a language, the answer is likely to be “the words of the language”. Learning vocabulary is a major focus of language instruction, and while everyone knows that there is a certain amount of ‘grammar’ that characterizes a language as well, even this is often treated as a kind of annotation to the set of words—the ‘uses of the Accusative’, etc. But what is it that is involved in knowing the words of a language? Obviously, a good deal of this is a matter of learning ...