Syntax vs morphology: what’s the diff?

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Syntax deals with sentence structure while morphology deals with word structure. Syntax governs word order and usage, while morphology studies morphemes and their meaning. Both are important for understanding language meaning.

The difference between syntax and morphology is that syntax deals with the structure of sentences and morphology deals with the structure of words. In every language there are rules that guide the way words are put together. These are the rules of syntax. Morphology is the study of how words are formed and understood within a language. Both syntax and morphology are related to how meaning is produced with language.

Syntax is a concept that governs the structure of sentences. The order in which words are put together affects the meaning of a sentence as a whole. Syntax rules must be followed for a sentence to be grammatically correct and make sense to speakers of a language. It’s what dictates things like subject and verb order and how adjectives and adverbs are used.

Morphology is the study of morphemes, which are the smallest unit of meaning in a language. A morpheme can be a whole word or a prefix or suffix that is meant to change the meaning of the word and thus takes on the same meaning. Morphology includes the concepts of inflection and derivation, which allow words to be pluralized or the tense of a word changed. The study of morphology attempts to understand how people use and understand the way words work, in an effort to understand the difference a morpheme makes to many words and how words relate to each other.

Syntax and morphology are both important to how people derive meaning from language, but they are different in that syntax refers to the order and use of words and morphology refers to the parts of words that create meaning . For example, you might create a sentence that is grammatically correct, but that doesn’t make sense to a speaker of the language. This is possible because syntax governs only the order of a sentence and not the meaning of the words it contains. On the other hand, a combination of words may make sense when used together, but lose its meaning when rearranged in a way that violates the rules of syntax. The syntax and morphology are different but depend on each other.




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