What is Morphology?

1.      What is the NATURE OF MORPHOLOGY?

      The term morphology is generally attributed  the Geran poet novelist playwright and philosopher Johann Wolfwang von Goethe (1749-1832) who coined it early in the nineteenth century in a biological context.

      Morphology is the study of word formation, of the structure of words.Some observations about words and their structure:

·         some words can be divided into parts which still have meaning

·         many words have meaning by themselves. But some words have meaning

·         only when used with other words

·         some of the parts into which words can be divided can stand alone as

·         words. But others cannot

·         these word-parts that can occur only in combination must be combined in

·         the correct way

·         Languages create new words systematically

2.      What is morphology

      ACCORDING TO Branches of linguistic theory : morphology as the study of words.

      According to Merriam – Webster unabridged : a study of the structure or  form of something.

      According to etymology is greek : Morph – means ‘shape,form’ and morphology is the study of form or forms. In Biology morphology refers to the study of the configuration and evolution of land forms. In linguistics morphology refers to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals with words their internal structure , and how the are formed

      Morphology is a part of Linguistics. It is a study of words. There are some definitions of morphology based on some experts as follows:

·         John Lions (1968) says :

“….morphology deals with the internal structure of words…”

·         L. Bloomfield ( 1973) says:

“ By the morphology of a language we mean the constructions in which bound forms appear among the constituents.”

·         H.A. Gleason ( 1970 ) says:

“….morphology is the description of the more intimate combinations of morphemes, roughly what are familiarly called ‘words’….”

·         Charles F. Hockett ( 1958 : 177) says:

“Morphology includes the stock or segmental morpheme and the ways in which words are built out of them”.

3.      What is MORPHOME?

      The meaningful parts into which words can be divided— e.g., boldest can be divided into bold+est--are called the morphemesof the language.

      There are some definitions of Morpheme based on experts:

·         L. Bloomfield says in his book,” Linguistics form which bears no partial phonetic – semantics resemblance to any other form is a simple form morpheme

·         .” Charles F. Hockett says that Morphemes are the smallest individually meaningful elements in the utterances of a language”.

·         Then, Ramlan (1980:11) says, “Morpheme adalah bentuk yang paling kecil yang tidak mempunyai bentuk lain sebagai unsurnya.” (Morpheme is the smallest element which cannot be divided into any other forms.)

Daftar Pustaka

ü  Morphology Peter H atthews (1974)

ü  An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy,Edinburgh University Press, 2002

ü  Francis Katamba (1993) in Modern Linguistics: Morphology

ü  Eugene A. Nida (1967) in Mrphology :The Desriptive Analysis of Words.