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Morphology is a branch of linguistics that studies the structure of words and the rules that govern their formation. It focuses on the internal composition of words, including their constituent morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units of language. Morphology can be divided into two main subfields: inflectional morphology and derivational morphology.

Inflectional morphology deals with the changes in word form that indicate grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, and gender. For example, in English, the verb "walk" changes to "walked" to indicate past tense, and the noun "dog" changes to "dogs" to indicate plural number. These changes are governed by inflectional rules specific to the language.

Derivational morphology, on the other hand, involves the creation of new words from existing ones through processes such as affixation, compounding, and conversion. Affixation adds prefixes or suffixes to a base word to create a new word with a different meaning. For example, the prefix "un-" in "unhappy" or the suffix "-ness" in "happiness." Compounding combines two or more words to form a new word, as in "blackboard" or "mother-in-law." Conversion changes the part of speech of a word, as in "happy" (adjective) to "happily" (adverb).

Morphology plays a crucial role in language acquisition, as it helps learners understand the structure and formation of words. It also aids in language teaching and learning by providing insights into how words are built and how they can be manipulated to create new meanings. Additionally, morphology is essential for various linguistic applications, such as natural language processing, machine translation, and computational linguistics.