TWO BASIC APPROACHES: ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS

The analytic approach has to do with breaking words down, and it is usually associated with American structuralist linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century. There is a good reason for this. These linguists were often dealing with languages that they had never encountered before, and there were no written grammars of these languages to guide them.

It was therefore crucial that they should have very explicit methods of linguistic analysis. No matter what language we’re looking at, we need analytic methods that will be independent of the structures we are examining; preconceived notions might interfere with an objective, scientific analysis. 

From a morphological point of view, the synthetic question you ask is, “How does a speaker of a language produce a grammatically complex word when needed?” This question already assumes that you know what kinds of elementary pieces you are making the complex word out of. 

We think that one of the real problems of a morphological theory is that we don’t always have a good idea of what the pieces are. Syntacticians can supply us with some tools: case and number, for example, are ancient syntactic notions that we can use in our morphology. But the primary way in which morphologists determine the pieces they are dealing with is by examination of language data. 

They must pull words apart carefully, taking great care to note where each piece came from to begin with.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://books.google.com/books?id=Vjfz9I-3tnMC&pg=PA215&dq=morfologia+linguistica&hl=es&ei=aeaCTeWtJY72tgPgy8HlAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

What is Morphology? 

Mark Aronoff and

Kirsten Fudeman