Definition of ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY and Its Construction

Definitions of Morphology So far there have been so many definitions of morphology coined by linguists. According to Bauer (1983:33-34), morphology is a branch of linguistics which deals with the internal structure of words. Morphology can be of divided into two main branches inflectional morphology and word-formation (also called lexical morphology). Inflectional morphology deals with various forms of word, while word-formation deals with the formation of new words from given bases. Word-formation can, in turn, be subdivided into Derivation and compounding (or composition). Derivation is concerned with the formation of new words by affixation, compounding is concerned with the formation of new words from two (or more) potential stems. Derivation is sometimes also subdivided into class-maintaining derivation and class-changing derivation. Class-maintaining derivation is the derivation of new words which are of the same class as the base from which they are formed, whereas class-changing derivation produce words which belong to different classes from their bases. Compounding is usually subdivided according to the class of the resultant compound: that is, into compound nouns (boy-friend, manservant, woman doctor, etc.), compound verbs (carbon-date, color-code, head-hunt, sky-dive, etc.), compound adjectives (capital-intensive, open-ended, ready-made, etc.). In the form of a diagram, the concept of morphology can be represented as follows:

According to Crystal (1980:232-233), morphology is the branch of grammar which studies the structure of words, primarily through the use of morpheme construct. It is traditionally distinguished from syntax, which deals with the rules governing the combination of words in sentences. It is generally divided into two fields: the study of inflections (inflectional morphology), and the study of word-formation (lexical or derivational morphology). When emphasis is on the technique of analyzing words into morphemes, particularly as practised by American structuralists in the 1940s and 1950s, the term morphemics is used, Morphemic analysis in this sense is part of a synchronic linguistic study; morphological analysis is the more general term, being applied to historical studies as well. Morphological analysis may take various forms. One approach is to make a distributional study of the morphemes and morphemic variants occurring in words, as in item and arrangement models of description. Another approach sets up morphological processes or operations, which see the relationships between word-forms as one of replacement (e.g. replace the lei/ of take with the /U/ of took, as in item and process models.

According to O'Grady & Dobrovolsky (1989:89), morphology is the component of a grammar that deals with the internal structure of words, particularly of complex words. The words of a language can be divided into two broad categories, closed and open, of which only the latter are relevant to morphology. The closed categories are the function words, pronouns, conjunctions, determiners, and a few others. Newly coined or borrowed words cannot be added to these categories, which is why we say that they are closed. The categories of words that are open are the major lexical categories: nouns (N), verbs (V), adjectives (Adj), and adverbs (Adv). It is to these categories that new words may be added. Because the major problem of morphology is how people make up and understand words that they have never encountered before, morphology is concerned only with major lexical categories.

Each word that is a member of a major lexical category is called a lexical item. A lexical item can best be thought of as an entry in a dictionary or lexicon. The entry for each lexical item will include, in addition to its pronunciation (phonology), information about its meaning (semantics), to what lexical category it belongs (syntax), and in what syntactic environment it may occur (subcategorization).

As with any other area of linguistic theory, we must distinguish between general morphology and the morphology of a particular language. General morphological theory is concerned with delimiting exactly what types of morphological rules can be found in natural languages. The morphology of a particular language, on the other hand, is a set of rules with a dual function, First, these rules are responsible for word-formation, the formation of new words. Second, they represent the speakers' unconscious knowledge of the internal structure of the already existing words of their language.