Syntax And Morphology Essay

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Section 2 - Morphology and Syntax

In this section of my Language Profile Project, I will be discussing two more branches of linguistics – Morphology and Syntax. Morphology is the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. Additionally, a morpheme is the smallest unit in a language that can carry meaning. There are numerous types of morphemes, which I will discuss in detail further on in this section of my project. While morphology is basically considered to be the structure of words, syntax can be referred to as the structure of sentences. In order to make sense, sentences have to follow certain structural roles. Again, syntax will be discussed in greater detail further on in this section. The simultaneous study of Morphology and syntax is often referred to as morpho-syntax.

Morphology in Spanish
As I have previously mentioned, there are numerous types of morphemes. All morphemes, however, can be defined as either free or bound. Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words. Contrastingly, bound morphemes are morphemes that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form. Free …show more content…

Inflectional morphemes in Spanish include the suffixes –a (a feminine gender marker), -o (a masculine gender marker), -s (a plural marker), -o (first person singular marker), -as (second person singular marker), -amos (first person plural marker), -aste (second person singular past tense marker), just to name a few. Derivational morphemes are used to change the grammatical categories of words. There exists a great number of derivational morphemes in the Spanish language, one example being the derivational morpheme –ero in Spanish, for example -cocinero which refers to the profession, chef, is used to transform the verb cocinar which means to cook, into the noun

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