Morphology & Syntaxis

Name : Nur Islamiyah

Id number : A12223005

Morphology, as mentioned earlier, is concerned with the internal structure

and forms of words. It examines how words are formed, the different types of
morphemes they contain, and the rules governing their formation and usage.
Morphology is primarily concerned with the analysis of individual words and
their constituent morphemes.
Syntax, on the other hand, is the study of how words combine to form
grammatical sentences and phrases. It deals with the arrangement of words and
the rules that govern their order, as well as the relationships between words and
the roles they play in a sentence. Syntax focuses on the overall structure of
sentences, including the organization of phrases, clauses, and the hierarchy of
grammatical functions.
Morphological Processes: Morphology encompasses various processes
that shape words. These processes include affixation, which involves the addition
of prefixes or suffixes to a base or root word. For example, in English, the noun
"friend" can be transformed into the adjective "friendly" by adding the suffix "-
ly." Other morphological processes include compounding (combining two or more
words to create a new word, like "blackboard"), reduplication (repeating part or
all of a word, as in "bye-bye"), and conversion (changing the word class without
adding any affixes, such as "to butter" [verb] versus "a butter" [noun]).
Morphological Analysis: Morphological analysis involves breaking down
words into their constituent morphemes and identifying their grammatical
properties. Morphemes can be classified as free morphemes, which can stand
alone as independent words (e.g., "book"), or bound morphemes, which cannot
function independently and must be attached to other morphemes (e.g., the prefix
"un-" in "unhappy"). Analyzing morphological structure helps in understanding
word meaning, word formation processes, and the relationship between words in a
language.
Inflection vs. Derivation: Morphology distinguishes between inflectional
and derivational processes. Inflection involves modifying a word to indicate
grammatical features such as tense, number, case, or gender. In English, for
example, the verb "run" can be inflected to "runs" to indicate third-person singular
present tense. Derivation, on the other hand, creates new words or changes the
meaning or category of existing words. For instance, the noun "dark" can be
derived into the adjective "darken" or the adverb "darkly."
Syntactic Structures: Syntax focuses on the rules and principles that
govern how words combine to form grammatical sentences and phrases. It deals
with word order, sentence structure, agreement, and the relationships between
words within a sentence. Syntactic structures involve constituents such as nouns,
verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and phrases like noun phrases and verb phrases. Syntax
also examines the hierarchical organization of sentences, including the roles of
subjects, objects, and modifiers.
Syntactic Analysis: Syntactic analysis involves analyzing the structure of
sentences and determining the grammatical relationships between words. This
includes identifying the subject and predicate of a sentence, determining the roles
of nouns and pronouns in a sentence, and understanding the syntactic functions of
phrases and clauses. Syntactic analysis helps in understanding sentence meaning,
sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, etc.), and the grammatical
patterns of a language.
a) Free Morphemes: These are independent morphemes that can stand alone as
words and carry meaning by themselves.
b) Bound Morphemes: These morphemes cannot stand alone and must be
attached to other morphemes to convey meaning. They include prefixes and
suffixes.
c) Inflectional Morphemes: These bound morphemes indicate grammatical
information such as tense, number, case, or gender. They do not change the
word's lexical category or meaning.
d) Derivational Morphemes: These bound morphemes create new words or
change the word's lexical category. They often derive words from a base or
root morpheme and significantly alter meaning or function.
e) Null Morphemes: Also known as zero morphemes, they do not have a
phonetic realization but carry grammatical information, representing features
or relationships without any overt presence.
Here are some key concepts and aspects related to syntax:

a) Sentence Structure: Syntax analyzes the structure of sentences, including

the arrangement of words and the roles they play. This involves identifying
the subject, verb, object, and other constituents within a sentence. For
example, in the sentence "The cat chased the mouse," syntax helps identify
that "the cat" is the subject, "chased" is the verb, and "the mouse" is the
object.

b) Phrase Structure: Phrases are units of words that function together as a

single grammatical unit. Syntax examines the internal structure of phrases,
such as noun phrases (e.g., "the black cat"), verb phrases (e.g., "is
running"), and prepositional phrases (e.g., "in the park"). It identifies the
head of a phrase and the modifiers or complements associated with it.

c) Word Order: Syntax investigates the word order patterns in a language.

Different languages have different word order preferences. For example,
English typically follows a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, as in
"She eats an apple." Other languages may have different word order
patterns, such as subject-object-verb (SOV) or verb-subject-object (VSO).

d) Syntactic Categories: Words in a language are categorized into different

syntactic classes or categories, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs,
 and prepositions. Syntax examines the distributional properties of these
categories and the rules for combining them in sentences.

e) Grammatical Relations: Syntax explores the grammatical relationships

between words within a sentence. This includes subject-verb agreement,
where the verb agrees with the number and person of the subject (e.g.,
"She sings" versus "They sing"). It also includes case marking in
languages that indicate the grammatical roles of nouns or pronouns (e.g.,
accusative, genitive, dative, etc.).

f) Phrase and Clause Types: Syntax studies different types of phrases and
clauses, such as declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory
sentences. Each type has specific syntactic features and word order
patterns.