What Does Morphology Mean?

It is a sub discipline of linguistics. The branch of grammar which studies the structure or forms of words is known as morphology. It refers to the study of morphemes, or the smallest meaningful units of language. Thus it is the study of the use of prefixes, suffixes, and compounding to form words. The main types are morphology is inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, and compounding.

This branch was started by an ancient linguist named Palini who introduced it in Sanskrit and formulated 3,956 rules. The Greeks and Romans also knew about morphology and used it in language. The term itself was coined by August Schleidher, a German linguist in 1859. Thus morphology is thought of as a system of adjustments in the shapes of words that contribute to adjustments in the way speakers intend their utterances to be interpreted.

Linguistics