Morphology

Abstract This chapter introduces the basic types of word structure and illustrates how words can be broken down into meaningful constituents. Every word has at least a root. Some words have more than one root, and in many words the root combines with affixes to form complex words. One of the challenges of word analysis is that the meaning of a word element may change depending on neighboring elements. English also coins some new words by blending two or more elements without regard for their morphological structure. For example, the word webinar, created by blending web with seminar, ignores the morphological structure of seminar (base semin + ending -ar) and simply replaces the first syllable, sem, with web. Blends like this one are highly popular nowadays, but most English words are the products of affixation or compounding.