fullmorphology

Full morphology is a term used in linguistics to refer to a comprehensive treatment of the morphological system of a language or of a lexical entry. It aims to account for all morphs that can affect a word, including inflectional endings, derivational affixes, clitics, and complex processes such as compounding, vowel harmony, reduplication, and other morphophonological alternations. A full morphologist’s account typically lists lemmas, the complete set of inflectional paradigms, derivational possibilities, and any allomorphy or context-dependent alternations that yield the word’s surface forms.

In practice, the concept is informal and its scope varies by author or application. Some grammars or lexical databases strive for a full morphology by exhaustively describing every permissible form for all major word classes. In natural language processing and computational linguistics, a full morphology often corresponds to a complete morphological analyzer or generator capable of producing and recognizing all valid surface forms from underlying representations, within a given language’s rules.

Languages with rich morphology, such as agglutinative or highly inflected languages, highlight the usefulness of full morphology. For Turkish, Finnish, or Russian, a full morphological treatment would enumerate noun and verb paradigms, case and tense systems, derivational pathways, and any relevant morphophonological alternations. Conversely, some analyses focus on partial descriptions due to practical constraints or linguistic focus.

See also: morphology, inflection, derivation, allomorphy, morphophonology, lemmatization, computational morphology.