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Explore the 15 Chapters

Choose a chapter to explore its five core topics, read the textbook pages, and open the matching video lesson or podcast.

Chapter 1: What Is Morphology? Words and Their Parts

Textbook pp. 14–26

Words can be counted and analyzed in different ways. This chapter introduces morphology, compares the evidence for wordhood, and explains how meaningful parts, vocabulary items, and grammatical classes relate to one another.

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Corrections:
04:40 Ignore the invalid tiny background tree labelled 'subject'. Word classes, such as noun and verb, are categories; subject and object are grammatical functions. The main 'Word Classes' heading is correct. Use the textbook's word-class tests on pp.21–22.

Five core topics

1.1 Morphology within Linguistics
Define morphology and connect word structure with phonology, syntax, semantics, and the lexicon.

1.2 What Is a Word? Criteria across Languages
Compare writing, pronunciation, and grammatical behavior as criteria for wordhood, recognizing that they do not always agree.

1.3 Lexemes, Word-Forms, and Lemmas
Distinguish abstract vocabulary items, their concrete forms, and dictionary citation forms, then compare word tokens and types.

1.4 Simple and Complex Words
Identify simple and complex words through recurring meaningful parts, separating morphological complexity from word length or syllable count.

1.5 Word Classes and Morphology
Use grammatical distribution and morphological behavior to identify word classes, rather than relying on meaning alone.

Chapter 2: Morphemes, Morphs, and Allomorphs

Textbook pp. 27–39

A meaningful word part can appear in more than one form. This chapter distinguishes morphemes, morphs, and allomorphs, then explains the roles of roots, stems, bases, and affixes.

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Five core topics

2.1 The Morpheme as a Unit of Form and Meaning
Identify morphemes through recurring form and meaning, and distinguish meaningful units from syllables or misleading letter sequences.

2.2 Free and Bound Morphemes
Classify morphemes by whether they can stand alone and whether they contribute lexical meaning or grammatical function.

2.3 Roots, Stems, and Bases
Distinguish the root of a word from the base of a process and the stem that receives inflection.

2.4 Types of Affixes by Position
Recognize prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes according to their position relative to a base.

2.5 Morphs and Allomorphs
Distinguish abstract morphemes from concrete morphs and identify allomorphs whose distribution depends on sounds or particular words.

Chapter 3: Morphological Analysis, Glossing, and Word Structure

Textbook pp. 40–53

A morphological analysis needs evidence from related forms and meanings. This chapter shows how to test word divisions, write clear glosses, and represent structures that can explain more than one interpretation.

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Five core topics

3.1 Segmenting Words by Comparing Forms
Compare related forms and meanings to propose morpheme boundaries, then check whether each proposed part recurs consistently.

3.2 Solving Morphology Problems with Language Data
Develop and test a morphological analysis against a complete data set, preserving distinctions in meaning and revising unsupported guesses.

3.3 Problems for Simple Segmentation: Zero, Unique, and Fused Forms
Examine zero, unique, empty, and fused forms that complicate a simple correspondence between meaningful units and visible pieces.

3.4 Interlinear Glossing and the Leipzig Glossing Rules
Read and construct aligned interlinear glosses with morpheme boundaries, grammatical abbreviations, and a separate free translation.

3.5 Hierarchical Structure, Trees, and Ambiguity
Use labeled brackets and trees to represent how word parts combine and explain meanings associated with different structures.

Chapter 4: Derivational Morphology

Textbook pp. 54–67

Derivation creates new vocabulary items from existing bases. This chapter explores the meanings and grammatical effects of affixes and explains why their combinations depend on the base, the language, and the order of attachment.

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Corrections:
05:20 Base restrictions are strong tendencies with exceptions and creative contexts. Satisfying a restriction does not guarantee an established word (textbook pp.59–61).

Five core topics

4.1 Two Kinds of Morphology: Creating Words and Creating Word-Forms
Distinguish derivation, which creates new lexemes, from inflection, which creates grammatical forms of an existing lexeme.

4.2 Derivational Affixes and Word Classes
Identify the input and output word classes of affixes and distinguish category-changing from category-preserving derivation.

4.3 Meanings of Derivational Affixes
Interpret recurring affix meanings, including agent, instrument, negation, reversal, repetition, and size, while recognizing polysemy.

4.4 Restrictions on Bases and Affix Order
Explain how sound, word class, meaning, and origin restrict bases, and use those restrictions to analyze affix order.

4.5 Native and Borrowed Affixes and Derivation across Languages
Compare native and borrowed affixes, their preferences and exceptions, and derivational patterns in languages beyond English.

Chapter 5: Compounding

Textbook pp. 68–81

Combining familiar words can create a new word with a special meaning. This chapter compares compounds with phrases, identifies heads and structural types, and explores how languages organize and interpret compounds.

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Corrections:
02:20 In the background blackbird tree, black should be labelled Adj (adjective), not N (noun). The foreground explanation is correct (textbook pp.69–71).

Five core topics

5.1 What Compounds Are
Identify compounds as combinations of bases, including neoclassical combining forms, and analyze compounds with multiple parts.

5.2 Compounds and Phrases: Tests and Borderline Cases
Apply stress, meaning, modification, inflection, and inseparability tests together, recognizing tendencies and borderline cases.

5.3 Heads and Types of Compounds
Locate compound heads and distinguish endocentric, exocentric, coordinative, and synthetic patterns.

5.4 Meaning and Interpretation of Compounds
Explain how context and world knowledge supply relationships between compound parts and guide interpretation.

5.5 Compounding across Languages
Compare head position and linking patterns across languages, interpreting left-headed and right-headed order in speech rather than script direction.

Chapter 6: Other Word-Formation Processes

Textbook pp. 82–95

Languages create vocabulary through several processes beyond ordinary affixation and compounding. This chapter explains conversion, shortening, blending, backformation, abbreviations, borrowing, and coinage, using evidence to distinguish how each new word developed.

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Corrections:
05:40 Borrowing adopts an existing word from another language; coinage invents a new word. The recap's combined 'adds outside forms' wording should not apply to coinage (textbook pp.88,91).

Five core topics

6.1 Conversion
Identify conversion as a change of word class without a change of form, using context, meaning, and inflection as evidence.

6.2 Clipping and Blending
Distinguish clipping, which shortens an existing word, from blending, which combines parts of different words.

6.3 Backformation
Recognize backformation as removal of an apparent affix, using historical evidence to establish the direction of formation.

6.4 Acronyms and Initialisms
Distinguish acronyms pronounced as words from initialisms pronounced letter by letter, rather than judging from spelling alone.

6.5 Borrowing, Coinage, and the Integration of New Words
Examine loanwords, calques, and coinages, including how borrowed words adapt to a language’s sounds, spelling, and morphology.

Chapter 7: Inflection and Grammatical Categories

Textbook pp. 96–109

Word-forms express grammatical meanings such as number, case, tense, and person. This chapter distinguishes these categories, compares inflection with derivation, and shows how languages differ in the meanings they mark.

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Corrections:
03:00 In the Arabic table, katab-ti is 2SG.F ('you [singular feminine] wrote'), not 3SG.F. Katab-at is 3SG.F ('she wrote') (textbook p.104).

Five core topics

7.1 Distinguishing Inflection from Derivation: Criteria and Difficult Cases
Apply several criteria to distinguish inflection from derivation and discuss difficult cases where individual tests do not agree.

7.2 Nominal Categories: Number, Gender, and Case
Compare number, gender, and case systems and recognize that languages differ in both available categories and obligatory marking.

7.3 Verbal Categories: Tense, Aspect, Mood, and Person
Distinguish tense, aspect, mood, and person, preserving differences between grammatical categories and the meanings conveyed in context.

7.4 Inflectional Features and Their Values
Represent word-forms as lexemes with bundles of feature values and distinguish inherent from contextual features.

7.5 English Inflection in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Compare the relatively small English inflectional system with Spanish, Turkish, and Modern Standard Arabic patterns.

Chapter 8: Paradigms, Inflection Classes, and Exponence

Textbook pp. 110–123

A paradigm organizes the grammatical forms of a vocabulary item. This chapter explains why different cells can share a form and why one form can express several meanings, or one meaning can have several exponents.

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Five core topics

8.1 Paradigms and Paradigm Cells
Build paradigms and identify cells by grammatical feature combinations, distinguishing the number of cells from the number of distinct forms.

8.2 Inflection Classes
Group lexemes by shared inflection patterns and distinguish inflection class from word class and grammatical gender.

8.3 Syncretism
Identify a single form that fills multiple paradigm cells while retaining the grammatical distinctions between those cells.

8.4 Zero, Cumulative, and Multiple Exponence
Compare one-to-one, zero, cumulative, and multiple exponence to explain different relationships between grammatical meanings and their realization.

8.5 Suppletion and Periphrasis
Distinguish full and partial suppletion from other irregularity, and examine multiword expressions that fill grammatical paradigm positions.

Chapter 9: Nonconcatenative Morphology

Textbook pp. 124–137

Word structure involves more than adding pieces at the beginning or end. This chapter explores insertion, repetition, internal change, templates, tone, stress, and simultaneous patterns in sign languages.

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Corrections:
01:40 The actor-voice forms are bumili from bili and sumulat from sulat, with -um- before the first vowel. The table incorrectly repeats the uninfixed roots (textbook pp.125–126).

Five core topics

9.1 Infixes and Circumfixes
Compare concatenative patterns with infixes and circumfixes, identifying where affixes occur and preserving their language-specific functions.

9.2 Reduplication
Distinguish full and partial reduplication and specify the shape and meaning of the repeated material.

9.3 Internal Change and Stem Alternation
Analyze vowel and consonant alternations, including ablaut and umlaut, without assuming every irregular change is suppletion.

9.4 Templates, Tone, Stress, and Subtraction
Examine consonant-vowel templates, grammatical tone and stress, and subtraction as ways of expressing morphological contrasts.

9.5 Simultaneous Morphology in Sign Languages
Explore how handshape, location, movement, and orientation can combine meanings simultaneously in sign languages.

Chapter 10: Root-and-Pattern Morphology

Textbook pp. 138–151

Arabic words often share a consonantal root while differing in their patterns. This chapter explains how roots and patterns contribute to verb forms, derived nouns, and plurals, while preserving important restrictions and exceptions.

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Corrections:
02:00 Istaʕmala means 'he used'. 'Ask for' is a common Form X tendency, not this word's translation; meanings must be learned individually (textbook p.142).
03:40 In the stem-based analysis, mudarris is formed from darras- by adding mu- and changing the final stem vowel a to i (textbook p.146).

Five core topics

10.1 Consonantal Roots and Vocalic Patterns
Identify consonantal radicals and patterns in related Arabic words, explaining their contributions without treating a root as an independent spoken word.

10.2 Arabic Verb Forms
Recognize Forms I to X, their structural differences and typical meanings, while preserving lexical restrictions and exceptions.

10.3 Participles, Verbal Nouns, and Other Derived Nouns
Analyze active and passive participles, verbal nouns, and other derived nouns, distinguishing whole-pattern meanings from individual affixes.

10.4 Broken Plurals and Sound Plurals
Distinguish suffix-based sound plurals from broken plurals that change the singular pattern, retaining the textbook’s case and form distinctions.

10.5 Comparing Root-and-Pattern and Affixal Analyses
Compare root-based and stem-based analyses and evaluate how each describes Arabic forms alongside English affixation.

Chapter 11: Morphology and Phonology

Textbook pp. 152–164

The pronunciation of a word part can depend on its sounds, its grammatical setting, or the particular word. This chapter examines allomorphy, boundary processes, stress, and vowel harmony through carefully conditioned examples.

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Five core topics

11.1 Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy
Predict regular plural and past-tense allomorphs from final sounds, distinguishing phonological conditioning from spelling.

11.2 Lexically and Morphologically Conditioned Allomorphy
Separate allomorph choices tied to particular lexemes from choices determined by grammatical properties such as inflection class.

11.3 Stem Alternations and Processes at Morpheme Boundaries
Analyze assimilation, epenthesis, deletion, and stem alternations, showing the conditions and ordering of processes at morpheme boundaries.

11.4 Affixes and Stress
Distinguish stress-shifting, stress-neutral, and stress-attracting suffixes and relate stress changes to vowel reduction.

11.5 Allomorphy across Languages
Analyze sound-based allomorphy in Turkish, Finnish, and Arabic, including the relevant conditioning vowels and consonants.

Chapter 12: Morphology and Syntax

Textbook pp. 165–178

Words and sentences influence one another. This chapter examines clitics, agreement, case, and changes in verb argument structure, then uses several kinds of evidence to explore the boundary between morphology and syntax.

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Five core topics

12.1 Clitics: Between Affixes and Words
Identify clitics and their hosts by combining pronunciation and grammatical behavior, and distinguish proclitics, enclitics, and affixes.

12.2 Agreement and Concord
Identify agreement controllers, targets, and features, including concord within noun phrases.

12.3 Case Marking and Grammatical Relations
Explain how case marking helps signal grammatical relations, distinguishing those relations from semantic roles and word order.

12.4 Valence-Changing Morphology
Examine passive, causative, and other processes that change a verb’s argument structure, separating grammatical subjects from agents.

12.5 Morphological or Syntactic? Analyzing Forms at the Boundary
Evaluate lexical integrity and borderline constructions using evidence from internal structure, meaning, and syntactic behavior.

Chapter 13: Productivity, Lexicalization, and the Lexicon

Textbook pp. 179–192

Some patterns readily create new words, while others have limited use. This chapter examines productivity, competing formations, transparency, and conventional meanings, and connects word families with learning and the mental lexicon.

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Corrections:
02:40 Institutionalization means becoming established in use; it does not require transparent meaning. Kindness is an established, transparent example. Lexicalization concerns whole-word storage, often with a specialized meaning or form (textbook pp.184–185).

Five core topics

13.1 Possible Words and Actual Words
Distinguish possible words from actual usage and forms that violate a pattern, and consider how new words spread.

13.2 Degrees and Measures of Productivity
Compare degrees of productivity using dictionary evidence, type and token counts, and hapax-based measures within a defined sample.

13.3 Blocking and Competition between Patterns
Explain how established expressions can discourage competing forms, treating blocking as a tendency rather than an absolute ban.

13.4 Transparency, Opacity, and Lexicalization
Assess transparency of form and meaning as matters of degree and examine how conventional meanings become less predictable.

13.5 Word Families, Dictionaries, and the Mental Lexicon
Relate word families and dictionary organization to vocabulary learning and competing accounts of the mental lexicon.

Chapter 14: Morphological Typology

Textbook pp. 193–206

Languages differ in how they package meanings into words. This chapter compares morphological patterns, separates synthesis from fusion, and shows how to interpret evidence from typological databases without treating language types as fixed categories.

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Five core topics

14.1 Classic Types: Isolating, Agglutinating, Fusional, and Polysynthetic
Compare isolating, agglutinating, fusional, and polysynthetic patterns while recognizing that a language can combine several techniques.

14.2 Degrees of Synthesis and Fusion
Calculate morphemes per word as an index of synthesis and assess fusion separately from the number of morphemes.

14.3 Prefixing and Suffixing Preferences
Interpret prefixing and suffixing preferences using the stated classification criteria, sample sizes, and limits of the data.

14.4 Inflectional Categories across the World’s Languages
Compare the distribution of inflectional categories across languages, retaining each feature’s definitions, sample size, and coding conventions.

14.5 Using Typological Databases: WALS, Grambank, and UniMorph
Distinguish the kinds of evidence provided by WALS, Grambank, and UniMorph and explain the limits of database comparisons.

Chapter 15: Approaches to Morphology

Textbook pp. 207–219

Different approaches explain word structure in different ways. This chapter compares morphemes, processes, paradigms, and constructions, then connects those perspectives with evidence from word recognition, language learning, and language technology.

Watch Chapter 15  ·  Listen to Chapter 15

Five core topics

15.1 Morpheme-Based Approaches: Item-and-Arrangement
Analyze words as ordered morphemes and assess where item-and-arrangement handles transparent patterns or encounters difficulties.

15.2 Process-Based Approaches: Item-and-Process
Describe morphological relationships as processes applied to bases, including affixation, internal change, and repetition.

15.3 Word-Based and Paradigm-Based Approaches
Analyze relations among whole word-forms and paradigms, distinguishing realizational and implicative views.

15.4 Constructional Approaches and a Brief Look at Formal Frameworks
Use construction schemas to link form and meaning and compare them with the chapter’s brief account of formal frameworks.

15.5 Morphology in the Mind, in Learning, and in Language Technology
Connect morphological theories with evidence from word recognition, vocabulary learning, and language technology without treating one analysis as universally sufficient.

About the textbook

Foundations of Morphology: For EFL University Students

Project Director: Prof. Munassir Alhamami · First Edition | Version 1 · 2026

Read or download the free textbook on Zenodo

Alhamami, M. (2026). Foundations of morphology: For EFL university students (1st ed., Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22926586

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22926586

Except where otherwise stated, the original textbook content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Material credited to other sources remains subject to its stated terms.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

The textbook was developed with assistance from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and NotebookLM. The Project Director is responsible for final editorial decisions and the released version.

Chapter titles and topic headings retain the textbook’s wording. The chapter introductions and topic explanations on this page provide simplified study support.

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