Morphology is a sub-field of
linguistics, concentrating on study of the structure and formation of
words.
Words are, linguistically,
units of expression in a language that have meaning to speakers of that
language. So. Consider the following words in English:
blood, lifeblood, blood-red, bloody, and bloodiness. No one would argue that these are not different words, meaning very different things; yet, they can all be broken down and shown to have a
common element,
blood. Likewise, if one were to look at all these words, they have some meaning associated with that common element.
However, take
blood and
blow. Although these share a common grouping of
letters,
blo, they have no
meaningful association with each other. Nor do
blood and
blunt, which share an
initial sound
bluh. Neither the group of letters
blo nor the syllable
bluh have any meaning in English as a
morpheme.
Morphemes are the smallest
meaningful units into which words in English can be broken down and shown to have either meaning or
grammatical function. They may refer to the real world and have inherent
meaning:
blood in the example above, but they also include
affixes --
suffixes,
prefixes, and
infixes (sounds inserted into the middle of a word) -- and rules for the creation of words such as
reduplication, a phenomenon found in some languages such as
Tagalog which consists of
duplicating some syllable of the
stem morpheme to create an inflected word. In Tagalog, the first syllable of the verb stem is reduplicated to create the present tense; reduplication and similar rules are, therefore, part of the study of morphology and themselves morphemes. Morphemes do not necessarily have to be linked to a sound, as in the example of reduplication, but often are, as is the case with affixes.
A word, therefore, morphologically, is a construction of one or more morphemes.
Morphemes can be
free or
bound. A
free morpheme, termed a lexeme in certain circles of linguistical study, is one that can occur on its own, as a unique and meaningful word. A
bound morpheme, however, can only occur as part of a word. Affixes are exclusively bound morphemes. Affixes also have two categories:
derivational, which change the meaning of the word and the way it functions in a sentence, and
inflectional, which change only the meaning and not the
lexical category, or part of speech.
Allomorphy is the phenomenon that occurs when a morpheme changes sound but not meaning. Allomorphy is characteristic of
morphophonemics, the area in which morphology and
phonology, the study of sounds and how they interact, overlap. The prefixes in
imperfect, irregular, illicit, and
incorrect are
allomorphs: they sound similar but not the same and they mean the same thing, a
negation. However, beware: the
-ly and
-li- in
friendly and
friendliness are not allomorphs: they are the same morpheme. Morphology is driven by sound, not the peculiarities of
English spelling.
*coughs* 2004.12.31@20:40 fnordian says re: morphology, I believe il/ir- and in- are two different morphemes, as one occurs in level 1 morphology and the other in level 2. the underlying representation for in- is In and it undergoes homorganic nasal assimilation to become im, etc., but there is no rule that could make in- into il-.
I sit corrected. I must note, then, one's Latin teacher's information (even if "Latin" and "Linguistics" both start with "L") is not to be necessarily relied upon in other fields... especially not without applying common sense.