Appendix:Morphology

This appendix is to give a glimpse at linguistic morphology and collect good publicly accessible further reading. It should serve the readers and also for project-internal purposes.

Morphology is the study of internal structure of words in terms of meaning-carrying elements smaller than words. The morphological structure of words stands in contrast with syllabic structure of words, phonological structure of words and orthographic structure of words.

Some key concepts and distinctions:
 * inflectional morphology
 * derivational morphology
 * morpheme
 * free morpheme
 * bound morpheme
 * affix
 * inflectional affix
 * derivational affix
 * prefix
 * suffix
 * infix
 * circumfix
 * combining form
 * cranberry morpheme
 * null morpheme
 * root
 * stem
 * nested tree-like structure of words
 * morph
 * allomorph
 * inflection
 * word formation
 * derivation
 * compounding
 * compound
 * neo-classical compound
 * blending
 * back-formation

The morphological analysis is often straightforward, such as decomposition of blueness into blue + -ness. It becomes interesting when things get ambiguous and unclear. We can ask such questions as:
 * Is describe composed of morphemes de- and -scribe? Is reduce composed of re- and -duce? Or are these merely apparent morphemes resulting from a naive analysis?
 * Are non-productive morphemes morphemes or should only productive morphemes count as such?
 * Do all morphemes need to carry meaning or are there exceptions? What about cranberry morpheme?
 * Do morphemes sometimes merge at the boundaries when joined?
 * Are combining forms separate entities or are they just species of prefixes and affixes?

In Wiktionary, classification of terms by morphology occurs as part of Category:Terms by etymology by language, e.g. Category:English terms by etymology. Thus, we can find e.g. Category:English terms by prefix and Category:English terms by suffix, as well as Category:English compound terms.