#MORPHOLOGY DEFINITION LINGUISTICS HOW TO#
#MORPHOLOGY DEFINITION LINGUISTICS FULL#

And not all languages are written with spaces in the way English is-not all languages have a standard written form at all.

But just as writing isn’t necessarily a reliable guide to a language’s phonetics or phonology, it doesn’t always identify words in the sense that is relevant for linguistics. This is an orthographic (or spelling-based) definition of what a word is. In everyday life, in English we might think of a word as something that’s written with spaces on either side. Words are also syntactically independent, which means they can appear in different positions in a sentence, changing their order with respect to other elements even while the order of elements inside each word stays the same. For example, content words in English ( nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) can stand by themselves as one-word utterances when you’re answering a question: (1) What this means is that a word is the smallest unit that can stand on its own in an utterance. If morphology is the investigation of how words are put together, we first need a working definition of what a word is.įor the purposes of linguistic investigation of grammar we can say that a word is the smallest separable unit in language. In this chapter we’ll learn about the different ways that human languages can build words, as well as about the structure that can be found inside words. We also know what combinations of pieces are not possible.

#MORPHOLOGY DEFINITION LINGUISTICS HOW TO#

One of the things we know when we know a language is how to create new words out of existing pieces, and how to understand new words that other people use as long as the new words are made of pieces we’ve encountered before. To go back to the simple example of cat and -s, in English we can’t put those two pieces in the opposite order and still get the same meeting- scat is a word in English, but it doesn’t mean “more than one cat”, and it doesn’t have the pieces cat and -s in it, instead it’s an entirely different word.

Not all combinations of pieces are possible, however.

#MORPHOLOGY DEFINITION LINGUISTICS FULL#

In many languages, however, words are often made up of many parts, and a single word can express a meaning that would require a whole sentence in English.įor example, in the Harvaqtuurmiutut variety of Inuktitut, the word iglujjualiulauqtuq has 5 pieces, and expresses a meaning that could be translated by the full English sentence “They (sg) made a big house.” ( iglu = house, – jjua = big, – liu = make, – lauq = distant past, – tuq = declarative this example is from a 2010 paper by Compton and Pittman).

Most words in English have only one or two pieces in them, but some technical words can have many more, like non-renewability, which has at least five ( non-, re-, new, -abil, and -ity). For example, the word cats is put together from two parts: cat, which refers to a particular type of furry four-legged animal (🐈), and -s, which indicates that there’s more than one such animal (🐈 🐈‍⬛ 🐈). In linguistics, morphology is the study of how words are put together.

Morphology definition linguistics