Topic 3: Morphology

Morphology

Morphology is the study of morphemes, obviously.  Morphemes are words, word stems, and affixes, basically the unit of language one up from phonemes. Although they are often understood as units of meaning, they are usually considered a part of a language's syntax or grammar.  It is specifically grammatical morphemes that this chapter will focus on. It is in their morphology that we most clearly see the differences between languages that are isolating (such as Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian...), ones that are agglutinating (such as Bahasa, Finnish, Tamil...), and ones that are in flexional (such as Russian, Latin, Arabic...).  Isolating languages use grammatical morphemes that are separate words.  Agglutinating languages use grammatical morphemes in the form of attached syllables called affixes.  In flexional languages may go one step further and actually change the word at the phonemic level to express grammatical morphemes.