Morfosintaxis

Morphology

There are different definitions about morphology, here are some of them:

• Morphology is the study of word formation and structure. Words are units that combined form sentences in a language.
• Morphology is the study of morphemes in their different forms, and the way they combine in word formation.
• The study of the structure and content of word form.
• Thestudy of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.
Morphemes

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit within a word. A morpheme cannot be divided without altering or destroying its meaning. Often, morphemes are thought of as words but that is not always true.  Some single morphemes are words while other words have two or more morphemes within them. Manywords have two or more syllables but only one morpheme.  Banana, apple, papaya, and nanny are just a few examples.  On the other hand, many words have two morphemes and only one syllable; examples include cats, runs, and barked. A morpheme does not necessarily have to be a word.  Example:  the word cats have two morphemes. Cat is a morpheme, and s is a morpheme.  Every morpheme is either a base oran affix.  An affix can be either a prefix or a suffix.  Cat is the base morpheme, and s is a suffix.

• Affix: a morpheme that comes at the beginning (prefix) or the ending (suffix) of a base morpheme. Note: An affix usually is a morpheme that cannot stand alone.  Examples: -ful, -ly, -ity, -ness. A few exceptions are able, like, and less.
• Base: a morpheme that gives a word itsmeaning.  The base morpheme cat gives the word cats its meaning: a particular type of animal.
• Prefix: an affix that comes before a base morpheme.  The in in the word inspect is a prefix.
• Suffix: an affix that comes after a base morpheme.  The s in cats is a suffix.
• Free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand alone as a word without another morpheme.  It does not need anythingattached to it to make a word. Cat is a free morpheme
Language Types:

• Isolating Languages: use grammatical morphemes that are separate words

• Agglutinating Languages: use grammatical morphemes in the form of attached syllables called affixes.

• Inflectional Languages: change the word at the phonemic level to express grammatical morphemes

|English uses all three methods|

Morphology and the General Linguistic Theory:

There are two laws about languages that might be universal:

• All languages have words

• All languages have morphemes

Inflectional morphemes do not change the meaning or part of the speech of a morpheme. They give additional grammatical information.

In English theyare easy to recognize, because they are always suffixes.

WORD, WORD-FORM AND LEXEME

We can see that the term “word” has been used in different senses. The spoken sign of a conception or an idea; an articulate or vocal sound, or a combination of articulate and vocal sounds, uttered by the human voice, and by custom expressing an idea or ideas; a single component part of human speech orlanguage; a constituent part of a sentence; a term; etc.
Homonymy
Are words written the same way and sound alike, but which have different meanings. In linguistics, a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings, usually as a result of the two words having different origins.
Some sources also consider the following trio ofwords to be homonyms, but others designate them as "only" homophones: to, too and two (actually, to, to, too, too and two)
Examples:
Peter left home at around eight o’clock
Peter hurt his left arm

You have to lie down and rest
Don’t lie, tell the truth

Lexemes
It’s also called lexical item or lexical unit. It’s a unit in the lexicon or vocabulary of a language. For example, in the English...