Caterina Donati, Business English a.a. 2008/2009
scheda 6
ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY
Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in
the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.) While words are generally accepted as being the
smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other
words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog catcher
are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the
rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats;
similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect
specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those
smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies
patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model
the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit. In a word, the morpheme that carries the core
meaning of the word itself is called lexical morpheme or lexeme.
1. MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY
In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their
morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no
morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily separable
morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are
"fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. The
classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative
language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages. Italian is as
well.
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