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.