What is morphological analysis?

Morphological analysis is defined as grammatical analysis of how words are formed by using morphemes, which are the minimum unit of meaning.

Generally, morphemes are affixes. Those affixes can be divided into four types:

• Prefixes, which appear before a stem, such as unhappy
• Suffixes, which appear after a stem, such as happiness
• Infixes, which appear inside a stem, such as bumili (this means buy in Tagalog, a language from the Philippines)
• Circumfixes surround a word. It is attached to the beginning and end of the stem. For example, kabaddangan (this means help in Tuwali Ifugao, another language from the Philippines)

Morphological analysis is used in word segmentation, and Part Of Speech (POS) tagging uses this analysis. I will explain about POS in the Lexical analysis section, so bear with me until we will connect the dots.

Let's take an example to practically explain the concepts that I have proposed. I would like to take the word Unexpected. Refer to Figure 3.3, which gives you an idea about the morphemes and how morphological analysis has taken place:

In Figure 3.3, we have expressed Unexpected as morphemes and performed morphological analysis the morphemes. Here, Un is a Prefix, and ed is a Suffix. Un and ed can be considered as affixes, Unexpect is the Stem.

Let's refer to another important concept and try to relate it to the concept of morphemes. I'm talking about how you define a word. Let's see.