Morphology

Morphology is the study of word formation. The formation of word can be one or more smaller components. The components forming a word are called morphemes. Morphemes can be divided into free morphemes and bound morphemes. A free morpheme is a morpeheme which can stand alone and has lexical meaning. A bound morpheme is a morpeheme which cannot stand alone. It does not have meaning in isolation. It has meaning when it is combined into a free morpeheme. The term morphology is borrowed from biological scienece which refers to the stady of shapes. In Linguistics this term refers to the study of the shape of words or the forms of word.