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Morphology

Morphology is the branch of linguistics focused on the study of the structure and formation of words within a language, including morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, and how they combine to form new words or alter word meaning.
Sub-categories:

Explore how inflectional morphemes create different grammatical forms of words, signifying aspects like tense, case, gender, number, and mood in a language.

Understand the process by which derivational morphemes combine with base words to form new words or alter word class and meaning in linguistic studies.

Study the formation of compound words and the rules and semantics behind the combination of two or more independent words in language morphology.

Investigate the relationship between morphological and phonological structures, examining how phonetic changes affect morphemes and word structure.

Learn about cases where grammatical functions are implied without overt morphemes or changes in word form, also known as null morphology in linguistic analysis.

Examine the phenomenon of irregular word formation where inflection does not follow normal morphological rules, resulting in entirely different roots.

Discover different morphological systems worldwide, comparing analytic, synthetic, agglutinative, and polysynthetic language structures.

Delve into how freely morphemes can combine to create new words and the varying levels of productivity in a language's morphological elements.

Study morphological analyses focusing on morphemes as the fundamental units of meaning and their roles as building blocks of word formation.

Explore the approach to morphology that emphasizes the lexeme, or abstract unit of meaning, over individual morphemes in word structure analysis.

Uncover the processes of reducing words to their base or root form, as used in computational linguistics and information retrieval systems.

Investigate clitics, morphemes that have syntactic characteristics of words but are phonologically dependent on another word.

Study the variations of a morpheme that result in different pronunciations or representations without altering the meaning, considered in morphological analysis.

Learn about the techniques used to identify and analyze the morphological structure of words, crucial for understanding and processing language.

Examine the intersection of morphological and syntactic structures, focusing on how word forms impact grammatical function and sentence structure.

Discover the duplicative process to alter meaning, create plurals, or intensify meaning, prevalent in many languages as a morphological feature.