Morphology

Morphological Analyzer

Break English words into their morphemes — prefixes, roots, and suffixes — with linguistic glossing and type labels.

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What is Morphology?

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language — it cannot be broken down further without losing its meaning.

Free vs. Bound Morphemes

Free morphemes can stand alone as words (e.g., happy, dog, run). Bound morphemes must attach to another morpheme (e.g., un-, -ness, -ed).

Derivational vs. Inflectional

Derivational morphemes create new words or change part of speech (e.g., happyunhappy). Inflectional morphemes modify grammatical properties without changing the word class (e.g., walkwalked).

Prefixes

Bound morphemes added before the root. They often change meaning but rarely change part of speech.

Roots

The core morpheme carrying the primary meaning. A word must have at least one root (also called a base or stem).

Suffixes

Bound morphemes added after the root. They may change part of speech (derivational) or grammatical features (inflectional).

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