Morphology

Morphology:

The branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure and formation of words.

Morpheme:

The smallest meaningful unit or grammatical element in a language.

Free Morpheme:

A morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word (e.g., cat, run).

Bound Morpheme:

A morpheme that cannot stand alone and must attach to another element (e.g., prefixes like un-, suffixes like -ness).

Inflection:

A morphological process that modifies a word to express grammatical relationships without changing its word class or core meaning (e.g., adding -s for plural).

Derivation:

A morphological process that forms a new word, often changing its meaning or word class (e.g., adding -er to teach to create teacher).