About Phonology

Phonology is the study the smallest units of speech sounds that make a difference in meaning.
Morphology is the study of meaningful form or the smallest meaningful units of language.
There are two basic divisions in morphology :
(1) lexical or derivational morphology; studies word formation which produces new words such as nation — national.
(2) inflectional morphology; studies word formation related to grammatical affixes: prular, past tense and possession.
A word is a unit which is a constituent at the phrase level and above.
A morphene is the smallest unit of language that has meaning. For example Cats has to morphemes- cat (singular) and cats (plural). Uneventful has three morphemes. event, eventful, and uneventful. Each morpheme changes the meaning of the word.
Morphemes are defined as the smallest meaningful elements in a language.
There are two types of morpheme. They are free morpheme and bound morpheme.
Free morpheme is the one that can stand alone such as: cat, dog, horse, car, bike, bus etc.
Bound morpheme is the one that cannot stand alone such as in affixation namely prefix, infix and suffix. Prefixes occur before the base, e.g. (un)tidy, pre(school), (dis)like. Suffixes occur in the middle of the base, e.g. kind(ness), angri(ly), judge(ment), teach(er).
Inflection is modification of words in accordance with their forms.
English verbs consists of five forms, namely: infinitive (see), the third singular present (sees), past form (saw), past participle (seen) and gerund or present participle (seeing).
eg.: I love a peaceful life. “love” is a verb.
Love is blue. “love” is a noun.
Do you like love potion? “love” is an adjective.
Analysis of inflections.
We must determine (1) the patterns of selection, (2) the arrangement of inflected elements and (3) any modifications involved.
Selection means parts of speech. These are classified by word patterns of inflection.
e.g: The verb “live” (regular) and “give” (irregular).
“live” is inflected by means of suffix: lives [z], lived [d], living [iŋ] while “give” is inflected by means of patterns underlying forms, namely irregular verbs. give, gives, gave, given, giving.
Derivation is the process of adding derivational morphemes, which create a new word from existing words, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (for example, changing a noun to a verb).
Paradigmatic
A dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined
Syntagmatic
Similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined
PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC. Contrasting terms in (structural) LINGUISTICS. Every item of language has a paradigmatic relationship with every other item which can be substituted for it (such as cat with dog), and a syntagmatic relationship with items which occur within the same construction (for example, in The cat sat on the mat, cat with the and sat on the mat). The relationships are like axes, as shown in the accompanying diagram.
syntagmatic
The cat sat on the mat.
paradigmatic His dog slept under that table.
Our parrot perched in its cage.
Paradigmatic contrasts at the level of sounds allow one to identify the phonemes (minimal distinctive sound units) of a language: for example, bat, fat, mat contrast with one another on the basis of a single sound, as do bat, bet, bit, and bat, bap, ban. Stylistically, rhyme is due to the paradigmatic substitution of sounds at the beginning of syllables or words, as in: ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night.’

On the lexical level, paradigmatic contrasts indicate which words are likely to belong to the same word class (part of speech): cat, dog, parrot in the diagram are all nouns, sat, slept, perched are all verbs. Syntagmatic relations between words enable one to build up a picture of co-occurrence restrictions within SYNTAX, for example, the verbs hit, kick have to be followed by a noun (Paul hit the wall, not *Paul hit), but sleep, doze do not normally do so (Peter slept, not *Peter slept the bed). On the semantic level, paradigmatic substitutions allow items from a semantic set to be grouped together, for example Angela came on Tuesday (Wednesday, Thursday, etc.), while syntagmatic associations indicate compatible combinations: rotten apple, the duck quacked, rather than *curdled apple, *the duck squeaked.