Term coined by J.W.von Goethe to designate the study of form and structure of living organisms which was taken up by linguistics in the nineteenth century as a cover term for inflection and word formation. In school grammar, morphology corresponds to...

Following a suggestion by Williams (1981), analogy of the structure of complex words ( word formation) with the structural principles of phrases, especially with that of X-bar syntax ( X-bar theory). As in phrasal syntax, the head constituent...

// n. (also morphosyntactic word) A particular morphosyntactic form of a lexical item occurring in certain grammatical environments. For example, singular book and plural books are two different word forms representing the single lexical item book in...

Change of a phonological rule into a morphological regularity through the loss of an originally present phonetic motivational factor. Thus, the plural formation by umlaut (foot: feet), which was originally conditioned by an -i- in the following...

Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.) While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is...