Module 4: Morphology

In linguistics, morphology is the study of how words are put together. For example, the word cats is put together from two parts: cat, which refers to a particular type of furry four-legged animal (🐈), and -s, which indicates that there’s more than one such animal (🐈 🐈‍⬛ 🐈).

Most words in English have only one or two pieces in them, but some technical words can have many more, like non-renewability, which has at least five (non-, re-, new, -abil, and -ity). In many languages, however, words are often made up of many parts, and a single word can express a meaning that would require a whole sentence in English.

For example, in the Harvaqtuurmiutut variety of Inuktitut, the word iglujjualiulauqtuq has 5 pieces, and expresses a meaning that could be translated by the full English sentence “They (sg) made a big house.” (iglu = house, –jjua = big, –liu = make, –lauq = distant past, –tuq = declarative; this example is from a 2010 paper by Compton and Pittman).

Not all combinations of pieces are possible, however. To go back to the simple example of cat and -s, in English we can’t put those two pieces in the opposite order and still get the same meeting—scat is a word in English, but it doesn’t mean “more than one cat”, and it doesn’t have the pieces cat and -s in it, instead it’s an entirely different word.

One of the things we know when we know a language is how to create new words out of existing pieces, and how to understand new words that other people use as long as the new words are made of pieces we’ve encountered before. We also know what combinations of pieces are not possible. In this module we’ll learn about the different ways that human languages can build words, as well as about the structure that can be found inside words.

Adapted from:

Anderson, C., Bjorkman, B., Denis, D., Doner, J., Grant, M., Sanders, N. & Taniguchi, A. (2022). Essentials of Linguistics. Pressbooks. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics2/