MORPHOLOGY: IMPORTANT IN SPECIALIZED SUB-LANGUAGES

• Morpheme: a distinctive collection of phonemes having no smaller meaningful parts (e.g, "pin" or "s" in "pins").
  
  
• Morphemes are often words, and in some languages (e.g., Latin), are an important sub-word unit. Some specific speech applications (e.g. medical dictation) are amenable to morpheme level acoustic units.
  
  
• Inflectional Morphology: variations in word form that reflect the contextual situation of a word, but do not change the fundamental meaning of the word (e.g. "cats" vs. "cat").
  
  
• Derivational Morphology: a given root word may serve as the source for new words (e.g., "racial" and "racist" share the morpheme "race", but have different meanings and part of speech possibilities). The baseform of a word is often called the root. Roots can be compounded and concatenated with derivational prefixes to form other words.