Morphology is a Greek word which means the study of form, structure or shape.

In
linguistics, it refers to the study of words, their formation and structure. Form and
structure of words mean how and what they are formed of. A word is combination of a
morpheme or morphemes_smallest meaningful unit of language - either derivational or
inflectional. For example boy is the combination of one morpheme, boys of two ,one
bound and inflectional and one free. Similarly ”beautifully” comprises three morphemes
,one free and two two bound derivational.
Free morphemes are morphemes which can stand alone i.e they are independent like
boy and beauty in the above examples while “s” “ful”and “ly” are bound morphemes
which are dependent on free morphemes, hence, they can not stand alone.
Free morphemes are either content/lexical or function /grammatical morphemes.
Content words are those that have semantic or conceptual meanings while function
words have grammatical functions.Closed classes of
words,prepositions,conjunctions,article and pronoun are considered as function words
on account of their grammatical functions.Open classes of words, nouns,verbs
,adjectives and adverb are content words. Pronouns are ambiguous; They can be
content because they do possess semantic /conceptual meaning.Bound morphemes
are affixes i.e suffixes prefixes and infexis. They are added to free morphemes either
for derivation or inflection.Suffixes are added after the free morphemes,like “ful” and “ly”
in beautifully. Both are derivational morphemes-morphemes which change the category
or meaning/sense of the existing words.Prefixes are put before the free morphemes
like “un” in unbeautiful.”Un” is derivational morpheme because it changed the meaning
or sense of beautiful. Infexes are added inside the words. They are rarely found in
English.Inflectional morphemes are those that modify existing words to express different
grammatical categories. They never change the part of speech of words or their basic
meaning.They are “S’” of plural nouns,possessive “s” and “s”or “es” of third person
singular,past and past participle,er and est of comparative and superlative adjectives
and”ing” of continuous forms.
The different variants of morpheme like the sounds of plural morpheme in “cats” and
“dogs”, or the different variant of plural morpheme in boys, men.sheep and children
which all are formed in different ways but are plural morphemes are allomorph.They are
added to the base one way or other for plural inflection. Base is the form devoid of all
affixes.They can be compared with the roots of plants from which all others including
the stem grow. Stem is the second in order to root as in plant ,for example in “playfully”
play is root and playful is stem. Base is any form to which affixes are added. All roots
are bases, but stems are not bases. Play is base as well as root while playful is stem
but playfully is not .

​Comparative morphological study of English,Urdu and Pashto:

There are many differences and similarities between morphological systems of English,
Urdu and Pashto. I will explain some of them.
Gender morpheme- In all of these languages there are separate words for male and
female: Boy and girl, dulha and dulhan,pukhton[male
pathan]pukhtana[female pathan] Pashto and Urdu
have also different verbs for both the sexes but English has the same verb for male and
female: He came. She came. Wo aya. Wo ayi. Hagha raghay[male came].Hagha
raghla[female,came].
Another difference that can be derived from the above examples is that English has
different pronouns for male and female while Pashto and Urdu have the same pronouns
for both.The distinction in English is made by pronouns while by verbs in Pashto and
Urdu.However Pashto can also has similarity with English as it ,in some context,also
uses pronoun based distinction rather than verb based distinction,like the following line
from Pashto song by Karan Khan: . Da zrha haghy nari krhi che da
cha na pati shaway[She called who had lost his heart] The male
counterpart of which would be:Da zrha hagha nari krhi che da cha na pati shaway[He
called who had lost her heart]
Plural morphemes made by zero suffixes:We have zero suffixes in English
like,sheep,fish and Mehman and Yateem in Urdu but hardly found in Pashto.The two
examples of Urdu do have plural when they are in objective casses but not in subjective
casses:Meham aya[Guest came].Mehman ayay[Guests came].Usni mehman ki qadar
ki[He respected the guest].Usni mehmano ki qadar ki.[He respected the guests].
Both English and Urdu use suffixes to get the opposite of adjectives,like unmarried and
Ghair shadi shuda while pashto has different words in such contexts e.g Zalmay[
unmarried male or male in his youth],Peghla[ unmarried female or female in her youth].
Meaningless morphemes can be found in Urdu and Pashto but not in
English.Oba,moba[pani,wani],kar,mar[kam,wam.
Usually comparative and superlative degrees of adjectives in English are formed by the
addition of er and est to adjectives,like pretty,prettier ,prettiest,while Urdu and Pashto
almost always have more and most for comparative and superlative degrees,which are
not as frequent in English,beautiful,more beautiful, the most beautiful,khubsorat,buhat
kh].obsorat,sabse khubsurat,khwalay[handsome] ,deer khwalay[more handsome],tolo
na khwalay[the most handsome] khwali[beautiful],deera khwaly[more beautiful]tolo na
khwali[the most beautiful]. Last similarity I will explain in this paper is
related and implicitly explained in the previous paragraph.It is about using one adjective
for male another for female which are found in English, Pashto and Urdu
like,handsome and cute for male ,beautiful and pretty for female, pyara for male, pyari
for female and Qabil for intelligent male,Qabila for intelligent female.
Conclusion-There are differences as well as similarities between the morphological
systems of English language, Urdu and Pashto.