In the original Greene Grammar text, the Morphology section was called the Etymology section. Etymology is the study of origins  of words. Etymology,  for example,  tells us that the linguistic origin of the past tense of the verb go – went – comes from the past tense of the older verb wend. Etymology also explains things like the fact that the English word noun derives from the Latin word nomen. Etymology is an interesting and important subject.

Morphology, on the other hand, is the study of the different forms that a word takes in different sentence situations. An example would be the way that a present tense verb takes different forms depending on the number of its subject. The present tense form of the verb see is  see when the subject is the singular I  or is any plural. It takes the form sees, with an s ending when its subject is singular.

For example

The writers see the main point.
A writer sees the main point.

Return to main text.