Published Article

ABSTRACT

Morphology is the study of the word formation processes of language and their relationship to other words in the same language. Morphemes analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, prefixes, and suffixes etc. It paper showed that morphological processes are governed by constraints which are characteristic of the components in which they arise. The paper discussed on the concept of morphology, morphology in syntax — which morphology operates below the word level while syntax operates above the word level. The concept of stems in linguistics, prefixes in linguistics, suffixes in linguistics were also previewed. In the lexical representation of formatives — Siegel made use of only two boundaries: # and +. And the formatives of English fall into four principal classes: (I) formatives which happen to be words; (II) stems; (III) suffixes; and (IV) prefixes. The paper also demonstrated on the two classes of affixes. However, the paper concluded morphology builds up word forms—typically by combining roots with other roots and with affixes, and also by applying other operations to them. Thus the paper recommended among others that teachers of languages should take time to differentiate between different element of lexical representation of formatives to the learners in order to avoid confusion.

KEYWORDS: Morphology, Stems, Suffixes, Prefixes, Linguistics and Lexical Representation of Formatives