Morphologie

Morphology is the study of form and structure in both living organisms and language, derived from the Greek morphe meaning form and logia meaning study. In academic usage, morphology is typically divided into biological morphology and linguistic morphology, though cross-disciplinary applications also exist in philosophy, archaeology, and anthropology.

In linguistics, morphology analyzes the internal structure of words and the rules for their formation. It concerns morphemes, the smallest units of meaning or grammatical function, and how they combine to produce words. Major topics include inflection (grammatical variation such as tense, number, case), derivation (creating new words from existing ones), and compounding (joining two or more words). Morphology also studies alternations, allomorphy, and the interaction between morphology and syntax or phonology. Languages are often classified by morphological type, such as isolating, agglutinative, fusional, or polysynthetic, reflecting how they encode grammatical information in word structure.

In biology, morphology examines the form and structure of organisms, including external features, internal organs, tissues, and cells. It encompasses descriptive anatomy, comparative morphology across species, and developmental morphology (ontogeny). Morphology informs taxonomy, phylogeny, and functional interpretations of shape and organization. Paleomorphology and evolutionary morphology analyze morphological changes over time, while morphometrics uses quantitative methods to measure and compare forms.

Across disciplines, morphology engages with questions of form-function relationships, evolutionary change, development, and variation. It provides foundational language for describing phenotypes, structuring biological classification, and understanding the architecture of language itself.