Morhology? What's that? May be it is your first time to know about it?
When I was in high school. I knew morphology is one of branches of biology science.
In a biology, morphology is a science studying about organism, of animals and plants which elaborate the parts of it. (wikipedia)
From the statement above it is known that morphology is a science of structures of a creature. Here I won't discuss of that topic yet I'll describe what is morphology in Linguistics
Morphology in linguistics is one of field in linguistics studying about words formation or morphemes in a language. (wikipedia)
Morphology is the study of systematic covariation in the form and meaning of words. (Martin Haspelmath and Andrea D. Sims)
Morphology is the study of the combination of morphemes to yield words. (Martin Haspelmath and Andrea D. Sims)
From three of definitions above, we can conclude that morphology is a linguistics studying words/morphemes formation and variety of words/morphemes combination in a language.
In English, morpheme is divided into 2, they are free morpheme and bound morpheme.
Free morphemes
is a morpheme that can stand alone to be a word without having tied to others. Free morpheme has some basic types, they are verbs, nouns, adjectives, prepositions, and others.
E.g. study (verb), man (noun), kind (adj), on (prep).
Free morpheme is divided into 2 kinds, they are lexical morphemes (open-class) dan functional morphemes (closed-class).
a. Lexical morphemes
Lexical morpheme is a morpheme which can stand alone and it can convey the message of our thought. This morpheme is classified into three types: verbs, noun and adjective.
E.g.: read (verb), baby (noun), cool (adj).
b. Functional morphemes
Functional morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone but the content to be conveyed is not yet clear. It is divided into 4, namely conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and pronouns.
E.g.: but (conj), at (prep), the (artc), she (pronoun).
Bound morphemes
is a morpheme that can stand individually but should be attached to other morpheme. It is devided into 2 kinds: namely derivational morpheme and inflectional morpheme.
a. Derivational morphemes
is a morpheme which, when attached to another morpheme, will form a new morpheme/word or form a word with different grammar (lexeme) from the previous word.
In derivational there are 2 types, namely it can be in the beginning of a word (prefixes) or in the end of a word (suffixes), in Indonesian we usually know it as affixes.
Example: the word beautiful (adj) is obtained from the word beauty (noun) which gets the addition of the morpheme "ful" which changes the noun into an adjective. Well, for that reason the morpheme "ful" is included in the derivational morphemes which are suffixes (located at the end of the word) because it changes the word from a noun lexeme to an adjective lexeme.
b. Inflectional morphemes
is a morpheme that is attached to/attached to another morpheme only to identify its grammar, not to produce a new word or form a word with different grammar (lexeme) from the previous word.
Example: the word books (noun) is derived from the word book (noun), here book changes to books because it is to explain that there are many books (plural), so it does not change the lexeme of the word, because the word book becomes books remains on the same lexeme, namely the noun lexeme.
Source:
1. Wikipedia
2. Understanding Morphology, Martin Haspelmath and Andrea D. Sims
3. The Study of Language, George Yule
