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Chapter 5: Morphology

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  • Page ID
    192611

    • Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi
    • eCampusOntario
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    Learning Objectives

    When you’ve completed this chapter, you’ll be able to:

    • Identify morphologically complex words, and the morphemes within them
    • Distinguish between inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, and compounds
    • Explain how a word’s morphology interacts with its lexical category
    • Analyze the structure of complex words

    In this chapter, we look at words and at the meaningful pieces that combine to create words. We will see that languages vary in how words are built, but that nonetheless we can find structure inside of words in all languages. In linguistics, the study of word forms is known as morphology.

    This page titled Chapter 5: Morphology is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi (eCampusOntario) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.