Morphology Resources by Subtopic!

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What is morphology?

Morphology can be defined in two separate ways. The first is "the study of systematic covariation in the form and meaning of/in words" and the second is "the study of the combination of morphemes to yield words". Simply put, however, it is the study of how words are constructed from parts (called "morphemes") and how these parts contribute to the construction of meaning.

Basic concepts

Common morphological terms and concepts include:

• Morpheme: the smallest unit of language that carries meaning
• Lexeme: the abstract mental representation of a word which includes its core meaning
• Word form: a word in a concrete and written sense
• Paradigm: the set of word forms that belong to a lexeme
• Lexeme/word family: a set of related lexemes
• Affix: a morpheme attached to a root word/base that changes its overall meaning
• Allomorph: when a morpheme has more than one form, whether written or spoken (an example is the English plural marker "-s" becoming "-es" after a word that ends in -y, such as in "babies")

Glossing

Glossing is incredibly important to breaking down morphological information throughout the translation process. It allows linguists to see and understand another language's way of putting morphemes together to create meaning. Glossing involves breaking down words and sentences, bit by bit, annotating each morpheme with regard to the type of information that it carries. This includes both lexical information (word meaning, directly translated) and grammatical information (tense markers, modality, subjects, objects, etc).

Learning to gloss can be difficult as there are very fixed and complex glossing conventions that linguists need to learn. I am learning them as I type (I am updating this page in my recitation...), and I will be able to fully delve into these conventions as soon as I'm comfortable with them. Until then, check out the Leipzig Glossing Conventions!