Which term describes how word forms contribute to meaning?

• A. Choral Reading
• B. Morphemes
• C. Plot Pyramid
• D. Morphology

Answer: (D)

Morphology describes how word forms contribute to meaning. It examines how roots, prefixes, and suffixes come together to form words and to signal changes in meaning or part of speech. For example, adding the suffix -ed to walk signals past tense, and attaching un- to happy changes the meaning to not happy. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning that morphology analyzes as the building blocks of words. So this question points to morphology—the study of how those word-form units combine to convey meaning. The other terms aren’t about word form and meaning: choral reading is a group-reading technique, and a plot pyramid describes narrative structure; while morphemes are the units studied, the field itself is morphology.