morfoloogial

Morfoloogia, in linguistics, is the study of the structure of words and the rules by which words are formed from smaller meaningful units called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning or grammatical function that cannot be further divided without changing its meaning. Word formation occurs through processes such as inflection, derivation, compounding, and reduplication. Inflection marks grammatical categories like tense, number, case, or agreement, typically without creating a new lexical item (for example, talk versus talks). Derivation forms new words or shifts the word’s category, as in "happy" becoming "happiness" or "teach" becoming "teacher."

Other processes include affixation (prefixes, suffixes, infixes), compounding (handbag, lighthouse), and alternations such as ablaut or umlaut, as well as reduplication in some languages. Morphology is studied across languages and shows broad typological variation. Isolating languages tend to rely on little or no affixation, agglutinative languages chain together many morphemes each with a single function (for example, Turkish), fusional languages fuse multiple meanings into single affixes (for example, many Indo-European languages), and polysynthetic languages form long words that express what would be a full sentence in other languages (for example, certain Indigenous languages of the Americas and Greenlandic).

Morpheme structure also interacts with syntax, including agreement, case marking, and word order. Allomorphy describes variant forms of a morpheme depending on phonological or morphological context, such as plural endings in English (-s, -es, or zero). Research methods include descriptive analysis, corpus studies, and computational approaches like stemming and lemmatization in natural language processing.