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In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, parts of speech, intonations and stresses, or implied context. In contrast, morphological typology is the classification of languages according to their ''use'' of morphemes, while lexicology is the study of those words forming a language's wordstock. While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the words ''dog'' and ''dogs'' are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", only found bound to nouns. Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of English's rules of word formation. They infer intuitively that ''dog'' is to ''dogs'' as ''cat'' is to ''cats''; and, in similar fashion, ''dog'' is to ''dog catcher'' as ''dish'' is to ''dishwasher''. By contrast, Classical Chinese has very little morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes ("free" morphemes) and depending on word order to convey meaning. (Most words in modern Standard Chinese ("Mandarin"), however, are compounds and most roots are bound.) These are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages. Polysynthetic languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed of many morphemes. The Chukchi word "təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən", for example, meaning "I have a fierce headache", is composed of eight morphemes ''t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən'' that may be glossed. The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, while the grammar of the language indicates the usage and understanding of each morpheme. The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology. ==History== The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist (unicode:Pāṇini), who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text ''(unicode:Aṣṭādhyāyī)'' by using a constituency grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by (unicode:Marāḥ al-arwāḥ) and (unicode:Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas‘ūd), date back to at least 1200 CE.〔Åkesson 2001.〕 The term "morphology" was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.〔''Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort "Morphologie"...'' ("For the science of word-formation, I choose the term "morphology"..."), ''Mémoires Acad. Impériale'' 7/1/7, 35.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Morphology (linguistics)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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