The short answer to the question with which we begin this text is that morphology is the

study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined in the languages of
the world, and the way forms of words are varied depending on how theyre used in
sentences.
Morphemes are the smallest units in the structural analysis of words. It is often said that
morphemes are the smallest units of meaning, but this is not quite accurate. They are the
smallest structural units the learner identifies; to be identified as such a morpheme must
have an identifiable grammatical behavior, but not necessarily an identifiable meaning.

Although we know that the subparts of these words once had constant meanings)
the learner of contemporary English does not know this (ordinarily). In any case the
words dont mean send across, send, through, send with

However, the root shows an identifiable contanst grammatical behavior: it

changes to when the verb is used to make the corresponding noun through suffixation of
2: Open and Closed Class Items

Morphemes are divided into two types: open class and closed class . Open class
items belong to categories/types to which new members may be freely added. For
example, you certainly dont know all the nouns in English, and even if you did, new
words come into use all the time to refer to things recently created, discovered or named:
quark, google, blog, tweet, grunge.

Closed class items on the other hand belong to categories/types to which new
members cannot be added. For example, plural agreement in English is normally
expressed with [- s], as is 3rd person singular present tense agreement. The agreement
morphemes are a closed class: new agreement morphemes cannot be added to an adults
grammar.

Similarly the modal verbs do, did, have, be, may, might, shall, should, will, would,
can, could, ought form a closed class in English. These are the only verbs which can
precede negation not or nt in Modern English: I did not see the movie. *I saw not the
movie (archaic) I (should) think not! *I think not the movie was worth seeing.

Closed class items are often called functional items because they typically have
a grammatical function such as showing agreement, or marking or changing the category
of other items to which they attach. Inversely, open class items are sometimes called
lexical because they form part of a vocabulary that must be memorized.

Many of our examples will come from English since i reading this book, I
assume we have that language in common but well also look beyond English to how
words are formed in languages with which you might be familiar, and languages which
you might never have encountered before. Youll learn not only the nuts and bolts of
word formation how things are put together in various languages and what to call those
nuts and bolts but also what this knowledge says about how the human mind is
organized.
The beauty of studying morphology is that even as a beginning you can look
around you and bring new facts to bear on our study. At this point, you should start
keeping track of interesting cases of new words .
In some languages, the use of morphology to pack complex meanings into a
single word is much more elaborate than in English. In West Greenlandic, for
example,tusaanngitsuusaartuaannarsiinnaanngivipputit is a single word meaning you
simply cannot pretend not to be hearing all the time. Other languages do much less of
this sort of thing: Chinese and Vietnamese are often cited in this connection, though
Chinese does have rather exuberant use of compounding (structures like catbird made up
of two exiting items). Despite this variation, however, morphology is an aspect of the
grammar of all languages, and in some it rivals syntax in the expressive power it permits.
We have seen above that the forms of words can carry complex and highly
structured information. Words do not serve simply as minimal signs, arbitrary chunks of
sound that bear meaning simply by virtue of being distinct from one another. Some
aspects of a words form may indicate the relation of its underlying lexeme to others
(markers of derivational morphology or of compound structure), while others indicate
properties of the grammatical structure within which it is found (markers of inflectional
properties).
All of these relations seem to be best construed as knowledge about the relations
between wordshowever: relations between whole lexemes, even when these can be
regarded as containing markers of their relations to still other lexemes; and relations
between word forms that realize paradigmatic alternatives built on a single lexemes
basic stem(s) in the case of inflection.
These relations connect substantively defined classes in a way that is only
partially directional in its essential nature, and the formal connections among these
classes are signalled in ways that are best represented as processes relating one shape to
another.