morphology

morphology

In biology, the study of the size, shape, and structure of organisms in relation to some principle or generalization. Whereas anatomy describes the structure of organisms, morphology explains the shapes and arrangement of parts of organisms in terms of such general principles as evolutionary relations, function, and development.

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morphology

In linguistics, the internal construction system of words and its study. Languages vary widely in the number of morphemes a word can have. English has many words with multiple morphemes (e.g., replacement is composed of re-, place, and -ment). Many American Indian languages have a highly complex morphology; other languages, such as Chinese, have a simple one. Morphology includes the grammatical processes of inflection, marking categories like person, tense, and case (e.g., the -s in jumps marks the third-person singular in the present tense), and derivation, the formation of new words from existing words (e.g., acceptable from accept).