We came up with a uniform set of sentences in English and then worked with our language contributors to come up with example sentences. The information is by no means exhaustive and there may even be disagreement among individual speakers about which expressions are the best matches for the English meanings. For more details, consult the Credits and Resources section. Click on the underlined text to hear audio clips. Morphology is the study of morphemes, the smallest units of language that carry meaning.
Syntax is the study of the rules and categories that underlie sentence formation.
Many linguists use the word morphosyntax to capture the fact that morphemes often have sentence-level functions. For example, a morpheme can indicate whether a form functions as a subject or an object in a sentence. A different kind of morpheme can indicate which noun an adjective is modifying. All of this is part of a language's grammar. Speakers can be fluent in their languages and have very little awareness of how all the individual pieces of their language work grammatically to make coherent speech.