Importance of Morphology in Linguistics

Morphology
The word morphology is derived from two Greek words “morph”

meaning ‘shape” or ‘form” and “ology” meaning “study of something.”
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed,
and their relationship to other words of th same language. It analyzes the
structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words,
prefixes and suffixes.
Importance of Morphology in Linguistics

Morphology plays a vital role in linguistics and it has several important
functions that are used for better understanding of a language.
Fuctions of morphology are discussed below:
1. Productivity of Language:
Morphology serves as a major tool in the productivity of language.
In other words, it is a good means to find out more about the
strategies speakers use in order to increase their lexical capacity. It
is not unusual that in some circumstances of our daily lives, as
speakers, we have to coin new lexemes and word-forms to express
our thoughts. Word formation ‘ex nihilo’ is a highly probable
phenomenon though, nonetheless, merely episodic in language.
However, the formation of new lexical units using the resources of
language; its morphology, is a continuous process. For instance,
through such word-formation processes as compounding and
derivation, different morphemes are combined to form new
lexemes as seen in the cases of the word-pair ‘black+list’ and
‘train+er’ respectively. Thus, with morphology, we try to capture
the underlying knowledge which allows native speakers to form
new lexical units by using language devices as derivation and
composition. Through word-formation processes, morphology
provides the means for extending the set of lexemes of a language
systematically. This mirrors the intuition we have on formation,
interpretation, and recognition of lexical components in a
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language. That explains why a native English speaker knows that
‘unprecedented’ is a word of a language but ‘precedenunted*’ is
not. Therefore, morphology contains the rules which allow the
speaker to increase their linguistic competence through their
application and as well help coin new words when the need
presents itself.
2. Spelling:
Also, morphology helps in spelling out the appropriate forms of
lexeme in a particular syntactic context. This only means that we
come to be aware of the correct ordering of words in a language,
paying attention to morphological rules. These rules indicate how
new lexemes and word forms are made, thereby functioning as a
redundancy rules with respect to established complex words of a
language. Thus, conscious of these rules, we are able identify the
correct forms of lexeme to employ in a particular syntactic context.
For example, in the word “trainer”, the morphemes “train” means
‘to teach skills for a particular job or activity’ and “-er” denote the
noun form ‘one who’, giving us the gross meaning ‘one who
teaches skills in particular job or activity”. This knowledge helps
us to determine its correctness in the sentence ‘the trainer is good’
but not ‘*the train is good’ in this sense. Such rules as this,
establish redundancy rules with which we can easily form similar
lexemes as painter, teacher, lecturer etc from their base forms.
3. Etymology:
Again, morphology aids us to identify and extract the root
comparison content of a word to help modify old words and or
even create various forms of the word. With that, we can effect
changes in its grammatical function; gender, aspect and tense. For
instance, we can extract and modify the root of the lexeme
“trainer” to get other forms of lexemes different only in
grammatical function, aspect and tense: trainee, training, trained,
trains etc.
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4. Comprehension:
This striking function of morphology enables us identify individual
morphemes which may be words, phrase or a part of words and
analyze their meaning and lexical function. Thus, equipped with
morphological rules and analyses, one can by mere inspection of a
word’s structure, tell the meaning of the word and its grammatical
function.
5. Text Cohesion:
With morphology, we are able to style up language and yet achieve
cohesion needed in text with different syntactic categories. For
example the following text “I like to play football. Playing football
can be very entertaining. I played with only my left leg until I
learned to use the right as well” looks more stylistic and appealing
than the text “I play football. I play for entertainment. I play with
my left leg. I play with my right leg too”. Not only is the latter so
abrupt and monotonous, but also lacks text cohesion. This is what
morphology helps us to avoid.
6. Vocabulary:
When we understand the formation of words through segmentation
of affixes and root words we can develop better comprehension of
meaning of words which will helps us in increasing our
vocabulary.
7. Decoding :
Morphology helps us in identification of structure of words by
analyzing morphemes. By understanding the structure and form of
morphemes we can better learn and identify words.
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References
 https://education.wm.edu
 https://wac.colostate.edu
 www.pitt.edu
 www.slideshare.com
 www.enotes.com

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Morphology

The word morphology is derived from two Greek words “morph”

Importance of Morphology in Linguistics

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