What is morphology

• Inflectional systems of languages differ, affecting the forms of words.
• Inflection, from traditional Latin grammar, is the altering of a word's shape to fit in a particular position within a sentence.
• Inflectional morphology is determined by syntax.
• Morphosyntactic features or properties, such as past, imperfective, plural, or genitive, are generally referred to as morphosyntactic features or morphosyntactic properties.
• Exponence refers to the realization of morphosyntactic features via inflection.
• In the word seas, the morpheme [z] is the exponent of the morphosyntactic feature plural, and in sailed, [d] is the exponent of past tense or past participle.
• Exponence: there is a one-to-one relationship between form and meaning, one morpheme realizes one morphosyntactic feature, a situation that Matthews calls simple exponence.
• Cumulative exponence is when more than one morphosyntactic feature maps onto a single form.
• In context-free inflection, there is a simple directional mapping between a morphosyntactic feature and a particular phonological string.
• Nouns and pronouns are marked as having a particular gender in the speaker’s mental lexicon, this is inherent gender.
• For any other lexical category that reflects the gender of nouns and pronouns, such as adjective and verb, gender cannot be inherent and must be assigned.
• Government or concord is how inflection may be assigned, which is generally in one of two ways: government or concord.
• English has a syntactic category of modals, or modal auxiliaries, used to accompany other verbs and indicate that the action or state described by the sentence is something other than simple fact.
• Morphologists speak of inflection only when dealing with bound forms.
• Verbal inflectional categories include tense, aspect, mood, voice, and subject and object agreement.
• The existence of zero allomorphs does not contradict the definition of morphological inflection.
• Most linguists agree with Chomsky that language has an innate component.
• In some instances, the inflectional feature encoded by the zero allomorph is realized overtly.
• Gender is a problematic category from a universalist point of view as it must be expressed through agreement.
• The term 'morphological inflection' is defined informally as 'bending' of a lexeme.
• In English, the governor broke the law is active and The law was broken by the governor is passive.
• In grammatical terms, the law, which undergoes the action of breaking, occupies object position in the active sentence, but in the passive sentence it occupies subject position.
• Nominal inflectional categories include case, number, and gender.
• Causative sentences like The governor broke the law for Smith express the meaning 'cause to do something', or sometimes 'allow, persuade, help to do something'.
• Universal Grammar, the theory developed by Noam Chomsky, states that all languages are identical at some level of analysis.
• The forms broke, broken, break of the verb break are not limited to expressing a passive, causative, or 'for X' interpretation.
• Government is more or less what it sounds like: one word dictates the form of another.
• When a noun is required to appear in an objective case, it cannot be said that it agrees with (reflects the case of) the verb.
• This is because verbs don’t have case.
• Prepositions do not have case-marked forms, either, but in many languages they require that their object surface with a particular case, such as dative or accusative.
• Case should be described as a “government feature” because nouns receive case under government by a verb or preposition.
• Nominal categories often appear on adjectives and verbs through concord, the most common nominal categories are number, gender, and case.
• Derivational morphology may or may not affect the lexical category of a word it applies to, and it typically changes its meaning.
• Inflectional morphology tends to be more productive than derivational morphology.
• Inflection does not change the core lexical meaning or the lexical category of the word to which it applies.
• Inflection is the realization of morphosyntactic features, i.e., those that are relevant to the syntax, such as case and number.
• Cross-linguistically, both inflection and derivation can be expressed through prefixal, suffixal, or non-segmental means.
• Virtually any noun in English can be made plural with the addition of [z] or one of its two phonologically conditioned allomorphs.
• Inflectional morphology can apply to words of a given category with relative freedom.
• Not every adjective can take the derivational affix -ly that forms adverbs.