# Morphology --- ## Defining 'word' Morphology studies relation and formation of words. Unfortunately, defining 'word' is an ambiguous process due to different perspectives on what classifies as a *single* word; are 'went' and 'go' different words? On one hand, they are phonetically and graphically distinct and although represent the same semantic concept and are conjugated from the same verb, they represent fulfilling the act of 'going' in the past and nonpast respectively. For some, this isn't enough to distinguish them. The solution is to consider them different 'word forms' but the same 'lexeme'; we start by defining the former and use this as a basis to define the latter. An essential part of building this theory requires an understanding of the smallest constituent of language that can have any meaning other than a random grunt or scribble. When a sequence of sounds or strokes first associates with a meaning, it becomes a 'morpheme'. phoneme; grapheme phonemic form; sequence of phonemes graphemic form; sequence of graphemes Phonemics and graphemics are both systems of language representation, though have their own nuances that in a theoretial setting become irrelevant. When the nature of language representation is irrelevant, phonemic and graphemic forms shall be referred to uniformly as a 'representation', and producting a representation is denoted as 'representing'. morpheme; atomic semantic unit within a language mapped to a phonemic/graphemic form 'Atomic' here is used to imply that a morpheme cannot be broken up into futher morphemes. Morphemes are partitioned into two classes: bound morpheme; morpheme that cannot exist by itself free morpheme; morpheme that may exist by itself The 'word form' can now be defined. word form; sequence of morphemes permitted by the language to constitute a member of a word class. At least one free morpheme must be present Word forms are concrete phonemic/graphemic forms in their own right that can be employed in a sentence by the rules of the grammar. The grammatical rules regarding a word form determines its 'word class'. word class; set of word forms that obey a similar set of grammatical properties noun adjective pronoun adverb verb conjunction particle This is sufficient for basic morphological analysis, however word forms are quite generic and don't highlight the existence and nature of relationships between different word forms. 'inflection', 'derivation', and 'compounding' are linguistic processes that create new word forms extend their grammatical case, change their semantics, or both! Inflection and derivation are word process ## Inflections and lexemes inflection; process of modifying word form to reflect a grammatical category Inflectional bound morpheme; bound morpheme that inflects a word based on a grammatical category lexeme; set of word forms related through inflection. Dictionaries often create a single word entry by the definition of a lexeme ## Derivations and word families Derivation; process of modifying word form to change semantics or word class (the former is technically included in the latter) Derivational bound morpheme; bound morpheme that changes the part of speech word family; set of lexemes related through derivation ## Compounding Compounding; process of combining two word forms (often free morphemes) to create a new word form ## root; primary free morpheme in a word to which bound morphemes may be attached to stem; prefix; suffix; affix; infix;