NATURE OF LANGUAGE: MORPHOLOGY. Morphology is the study of word formation.

The word morphology itself comes from the Greek word morphe, which means form. Morphology is to words what syntax is to sentences. A morpheme can be defined as a minimal unit having more or less constant meaning associated with more or less constant form. Consider a simple example: the word buyer is made up of three morphemes {buy} + {er} + {s}. There are five points to note about morphemes. First, they have distinct form of syllables. Second, morphemes are distinct from semantic features, in that they are reflected by their spelling. Third, identical spellings do not necessarily indicate identical morphemes. Fourth, the definition of a morpheme as minimal unit. Fifth, the goal of morphological analysis is to determine the rules that the speakers actually follow for forming words in particular language. There are five facts that we can make about the structure of words in English. First, the fact that words are made up of meaningful units. Next, the fact that some morphemes, called lexical morphemes, others, called grammatical morphemes. Lexical morphemes have a sense (i.e., meaning) in and of themselves.Nouns, verbs, and adjectives (e.g., {girl}, {run}, {fast}) are typical of lexical morphemes. On the other hand, grammatical morphemes do not really have a sense in and themselves as in the preposition, articles and conjunctions (e.g., {of}, {the}, and {but}). Furthermore, the fact of distinction between free and bound morpheme. Free morphemes are those that can stand alone as words compared to bound morphemes. For example, the form serve can stand alone as a word from the word preserve as compared to pre-. In addition, the facts on inflectional and derivational that dissected from bound morphemes. Last but not least, facts of that language create new words systematically. For instant, TV and telly are both formed from television. In conclusion, all of these phenomena are essentially morphological in nature. That is, they have to do with the internal structure of words.