Write about MORPHOLOGY, explaining what it is, its objective and its importance to Linguistics.

(300 - 400 words)

Language is what differs human beings from another species. The ability to
communicate through a system of signs and sounds is what made humanity develop and
flourish. Along with thousands of years of revolution, humans have created many different
languages all across the globe. But despite this diversity, all languages share some basic
properties. The function of linguistics is to understand and explain these properties, establishing
the differences and similarities among all of these languages. Morphology is a branch of
linguistics that studies how words are formed, and is fundamental in order to establish a better
understanding of any language.
Word, according to the Cambridge online dictionary is "a single unit of language that has
a meaning and can be spoken or written". Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies
the internal structure of words and their meaningful parts. The word morphology means study of
forms. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a word . A morpheme can be either free
or bound. A free morpheme is a word that stands alone and cannot be divided, like "cat", for
example. A bound morpheme is a part that cannot stand by itself, such as the "s" in "cats". The
word "cats"is therefore formed by two morphemes - "cat" and "s", being the "s" a mark of plural.
Hence, a word's form can add several information about it, like tense, meaning, grammatical
context or whether it is a single or plural word.
The aim of morphology is to describe the structures of words and patterns of word
formation in a language. By understanding the internal constituent parts of words and
understanding morphemes relationships one is able to understand how a language is built, how
new words are created and how existing words are modified. A word is normally associated with
a certain idea, image or event, but by modifying a form of a word can add information to it, like
when something occurred, how it occurred or who participated in it. Donna Lardiere stated that
"by manipulating various parts of a word, we can shade, intensify, or even negate its basic
meaning, or change its grammatical role within a sentence".