Even if Polonius found Hamlet's reply “Words, words, words” a trifle odd, he had no reason to question what it meant – after all, the prince was holding a book, which is where anyone would expect to find words. Like Polonius, most of the time we act as if we knew what a word is, and feel no urge to question the status of words like chuva ‘rain,’ filhinho ‘sonny,’ ponta ‘point,’ guarda ‘guard,’ pé ‘foot,’ or papai ‘daddy.’ But what about forms like pontapé ‘kick,’ guarda-chuva ‘umbrella,’ filhinho-de-papai ‘mamma's boy’? Are they single words or combinations of two or three words? And what should we say of word combinations that function like a meaning unit, such as bico-de-papagaio, rabo-de-arara, parece-mas-não-é or planta-de-Natal, which despite their literal meanings (respectively ‘parrot's beak,’ ‘macaw's tail,’ ‘it-seems-but-it-isn't,’ ‘Christmas plant’) are simple regional Brazilian names for the Euphorbia pulcherrima, the poinsétia ‘poinsettia’ of Yuletide fame? In this chapter we will look into morphology, itself made up of two Greek words, morphē ‘form’ + logos ‘study,’ that is, the study of the form of words.

Words and morphemes

Despite their variety, words have a definite internal structure. In words like carros or senhores, we recognize two formants. One is the stem° (carr -, senhor), which bears the lexical° meaning of an extralinguistic referent°, such as things, persons, ideas, and so on. The other is a suffix° (-s, -es), attached to the stem and carrying the meaning ‘plural.’