Wordstructure

Wordstructure refers to the internal organization of words in a language, focusing on how meaningful units combine to form spoken and written forms. At the heart are morphemes, the smallest meaningful units, which can be free (standalone words like rain) or bound (must attach to another form, such as the plural s). A word may contain a root or stem, plus affixes—prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or circumfixes—that modify meaning or grammatical function. Morphemes may show allomorphy, surface variants that alternate in different contexts (for example, the plural forms /s/, /z/, /ɪz/ in cats, dogs, horses).

Word formation encompasses several processes. Derivation creates new words with related meanings (happy → happiness); inflection modifies a word’s form to encode grammatical information (cat → cats). Compounding joins two or more words into a single unit (keyboard, classroom). Conversion or zero-derivation forms a new word without changing form (to run as a noun: a run). Other processes include clipping, blending, back-formation, and reduplication in various languages.

The structure of words interacts with phonology, influencing permissible syllable configurations and stress patterns. Syllables typically consist of onset, nucleus, and coda, with language-specific phonotactics shaping which morpheme sequences are allowed. Typologically, languages differ in word-building strategies: isolating languages favor few affixes and many monomorphemic words, while agglutinative and fusional languages pack more information into bound morphemes.

Examples illustrate layering: unbelievable becomes un- + believe + -able, with further derivation to believability by adding -ness, showing multiple morphological steps in a single word. Wordstructure thus encompasses morphology, phonology, and typology as they relate to how words are formed and used.