Morphology as a branch of linguistics. The morphemic structure of English words. Typology of morphemes. Structural and semantic classifications of morphemes.

Morphology is a branch of linguistics which studies the form, inner structure, function, and patterns of occurrence of a morphemeas the smallest meaningful unit of language.

The term morphology (Gr. morphé ‘form, shape’ and lógos ‘study’) was borrowed from biology by the German writer J. W. von Goethe in the 19th century; it was taken up by linguistics to designate the study of form and structure of living organisms as a cover term for inflection and word formation.

Theoretical foundations of morphology were laid in Aristotle’s grammars and Stoics’ works, who were the first to define four parts of speech (the noun, the verb, the conjunction, and the link), introduced the notions of case, gender system of nouns, the system of verbal tenses.

The fundamental principles of modern European grammars were established by Aristotle’s disciple Dionysus from Fracia (II c. BC), who singled out eight parts of speech (the noun, the verb, the participle, the link, the pronoun, the preposition, the adverb, and the conjunction).

In the 19th c. interest in morphology was stimulated by the development of approaches to world languages classification resulting in the study of general laws of structure and significant elements such as prefixes and inflections.

In the 20th c. the field of morphology has been narrowed to the study of the internal structure of words.

The structure of English words:

A morpheme (Gr. morphé ‘form, shape’) is one of the fundamental units of a language, a minimum sign that is an association of a given meaning with a given form (sound and graphic), e.g. old, un+happy, grow+th, blue+colour+ed.

Depending on the number of morphemes, words are divided into:

monomorphic are root-words consisting of only one root-morpheme, i.e. simple words, e.g. to grow, a book, white, fast etc.

polymorphic are words consisting of at least one root-morpheme and a number of derivational affixes, i.e. derivatives, compounds, e.g. good-looking, employee, blue-eyed etc.

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