morphologydrawing

Morphologydrawing is a visualization method for representing the morphological structure of words and related morphemes. It pairs linguistic morphology with diagrammatic drawing to reveal how stems combine with affixes, inflectional endings, derivational processes, and allomorphy, emphasizing spatial relationships over linear sequences.

Practitioners create diagrams with a central stem and connected nodes for affixes, inflections, and derivational steps. Edges are labeled by function (prefix, suffix, infix), and colors differentiate roots, affixes, and allomorphs. The approach can be drawn by hand or generated with software.

The term is relatively recent and not standardized. It emerged in linguistic visualization discussions in the 2020s as an alternative to morpheme trees and glossed exemplars, offering a more compact, spatial representation of morpheme structure.

Applications include language documentation, education, lexicography, and computational linguistics. For example, the English word unbelievable can be drawn with center "believe" and connected "un-" and "-able," annotated for negation and ability.

Limitations include potential complexity for highly agglutinative languages and the lack of universal conventions, which can hinder cross-language comparison. It is most effective as a complementary tool to traditional morphology representations.