Morphology - A Brief Introduction

Morphology is the study of word structure. People who study morphology generally recognize two distinct fields: inflectional and derivational morphology. Inflectional morphology is the study of the way words change when used in different grammatical contexts, for instance I run versus he runs. Derivational morpholgy, as in revolve versus revolution is concerned with the principles behind the creation of completely new words, and is less concerned with the grammatical role they play. Derivational rules tend to be much less productive, or regular, than inflectional rules, and they also are much more likely to involve changes in the category, or part-of-speech, of a word than are inflectional rules.

Morphotactics and Agglutination

While the morphology of English is relatively simple, some other languages allow multiple levels of inflection. Morphotactics is the study of these levels. Some examples of agglutinative languages (those that have a complex morphotactics) are Turkish and Finnish.

Two-Level Rules