Morfoloji

Morfoloji is the branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed and related to other words. It examines morphemes, the smallest units of meaning or grammatical function, and how they combine with roots or stems to create words. Morphology covers the inventory of morphemes, their positions in a word, and the procedures for attaching or modifying them.

A basic distinction in morphology is between inflectional morphology and derivational morphology. Inflectional morphology encodes grammatical information such as tense, number, case, aspect, mood, or person without changing the word’s category. Derivational morphology creates new words and can alter a word’s part of speech or semantic nuance, often forming prefixes, suffixes, or infixes. Some approaches also treat compounding—the combination of two or more independent words—as a morphological process.

Morphology also considers morphophonology, the interaction between morphological structure and phonology. Morphemes may have several allomorphs, different pronunciations or shapes depending on context, such as the plural suffix in English appearing as -s, -es, or none.

Typologically, languages vary in how they use morphology. Isolating languages rely little on affixes, while agglutinative languages attach clear, separable morphemes (Turkish, Finnish). Fusional languages fuse multiple grammatical meanings into single affixes (Latin, Russian), and polysynthetic languages encode complex ideas within long words.

In modern linguistics, morphology intersects with syntax and phonology. Computational morphology develops tools like morphological analyzers, stemmers, and lemmatizers for natural language processing, aiding tasks from parsing to language generation.