n.
In linguistics, the internal construction system of words and its study.
Languages vary widely in the number of morpheme s 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 ).