Home › Glossary › Letter M

Morphological change

Grammar
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Alteration in a word's form to express grammatical categories like tense, case, or number; in poetry, morphological change can affect rhythm, create archaism, or add emotional inflection to language.

Detailed Definition
Morphological change involves altering a word’s internal structure—through affixation, compounding, or derivation—to shift its meaning or grammatical role, often used in poetry to create neologisms, ambiguity, or rhythmic surprise within a line.
Example
Example in poetry:
In English, “run” → “ran” shows past-tense morphological change; In Latin, “amo” → “amavi” shifts verb form; In Russian, “дом” (house) → “дома” (of the house) changes case ending; In Arabic, “kataba” (he wrote) → “kutiba” (it was written) alters voice through morphology.
Additional Notes
Morphological change alters a word’s form through affixes or internal shifts to change meaning or function; important in poetic diction—e.g., turning “hope” into “hopeful” or “hopeless” shifts emotional tone.
Also Known As
Word-form shift morphemic alteration lexical transformation grammatical mutation Inflection
Skip to main content