biçimbilim

Biçimbilim, also known as morphology, is a branch of linguistics that studies the structure of words and how they are formed. It examines the smallest meaningful units of language, called morphemes, and the rules that govern their combination. Morphemes can be broadly categorized into free morphemes, which can stand alone as words (e.g., "cat," "run"), and bound morphemes, which must be attached to another morpheme to have meaning (e.g., the plural "-s" in "cats," the past tense "-ed" in "walked").

The study of biçimbilim includes analyzing inflectional morphology, which deals with grammatical changes to words (like tense, number, or case), and derivational morphology, which concerns the creation of new words or words of a different grammatical category (for example, adding "-ness" to "happy" to form "happiness"). Understanding biçimbilim is crucial for comprehending word formation processes, such as compounding (combining two or more words, like "blackboard"), affixation (adding prefixes or suffixes, like "un-" in "unhappy"), and reduplication (repeating a word or part of it). This linguistic field helps explain the regularity and systematicity found in the vocabulary of a language and contributes to our understanding of language acquisition and evolution.