Assignment # 9 Mareena Fayyaz M.

Phil P-97

A Detail Note on Morphology and Syntax

What is Morphology?
The term morphology is generally attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright, and
philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), 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 they are formed.
Morpheme
A morpheme is a unit of meaning. It does not necessarily relate to the "word count" or
"syllable count" of an utterance. Here is an example of the way morphemes are counted in
the words happy, unhappy, unhappily, and unhappiest, and the sentence 'He meets the
unhappiest boys:
What is Syntax?
In Linguistics, syntax is a traditional term for the study the rules governing the combination
of words to form sentences. It is distinguished from morphology, which is the study of word
structure. Syntax refers to the rules of word order and word combinations in order to form
phrases and sentences.

Key Differences of Morphology and Syntax with Examples

Differences
Morphology Syntax
Study of words Study of sentences
Deals with structures of words Deals with the structure of sentences
How words are ordered together in
How words are formed
sentences
Morpheme is simple unit Words are smallest units

 Morphology and syntax contribute to the study of linguistics through the analyzing of
words and sentences.
 Although they are both involved with the influence of words in language, one study
looks at the word as its model to be studied, while the other looks at studying the
words within a sentence and how their order and structure influence the meaning of
the sentence.
 The study of syntax involves knowing the different parts of speech to understand the
role that the word or words may be contributing to the sentence.  Words can be used
as nouns, verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech.  Each individual word can be
studied individually to understand how a suffix or prefix or the use of a word in a
different context can change the meaning of the word.
 Morphology and syntax are tools used by the linguist to understand the way a
language works.  Different languages have their own specific word order and the
linguist studies these differences within the structure of syntax and morphology.
Assignment # 9 Mareena Fayyaz M.Phil P-97

 Derivational morphology can produce complex word-forms which have radically

different syntactic properties than those of the stem to which the morphology
attaches. It can, for example, change the syntactic category or subcategory of a
word, and thereby alter its selectional properties. Derivational morphology can also
radically alter a word's selectional properties without changing its category.
 Inflectional morphology, in contrast, is generally mandatory, and is often driven
by the presence of a particular syntactic configuration, rather than the other way
around.
Examples
1. He meets the unhappiest boys
'He meets the unhappiest boys' is 1-sentence, it has 5-words, and 8-syllables, and it
contains nine morphemes:

He meet s the un happi est boy s

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

2. The girl's mother slowly filled the bucket with water.

'The girl's mother slowly filled the bucket with water' is 1-sentence, it has 9-words,
and 13-syllables, and it contains twelve morphemes:

The girl s mother slow ly fill ed the bucket with water

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12