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Bronwyn Bjorkman is a linguist whose research connects linguistic morphology, syntax and semantics. Her Queen's University profile identifies a particular focus on grammatical tense and grammatical aspect: how word forms and sentence structure express temporal relationships. It also describes work on the representation and manipulation of grammatical information.^[ref]

This work separates the form of an expression from the interpretation it receives, rather than assuming that a grammatical ending has the same function in every language. She received her doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 and is a coauthor of Essentials of Linguistics (2nd edition) by Catherine Anderson and others.

Derivational morphology forms lexical items from existing bases, changing meaning and sometimes lexical category. It is part of linguistic morphology, alongside inflection, which supplies grammatical forms of a lexeme. The distribution of an affix matters as well as its visible spelling.^[ref]

For example, adding -ness to the adjective kind gives the noun kindness; adding un- to kind gives another adjective, unkind. Combining the operations yields unkindness. A category-sensitive analysis first forms unkind, then attaches -ness: this use of un- selects an adjective, whereas kindness is already a noun. The intermediate structure explains a restriction that merely listing the three morphemes misses. Derivational morphology therefore connects reusable word-building rules to both syntax and semantics.

FieldWorks Language Explorer is software for building lexical resources and analyzing language data. It combines a lexical database with text analysis, allowing forms in a text corpus to be connected to entries and proposed analyses into morphemes. Its official documentation describes both manual and automatic word parsing and the production of dictionary and grammatical resources.^[ref]

For an illustrative workflow, a recorded occurrence of walked can be associated with a WALK lexeme, a segmentation into walk and -ed, and a past grammatical tense analysis. An interlinear gloss can display these aligned layers while preserving the original form. A later occurrence supplies a chance to test the analysis rather than merely reproduce a translation. Alternative segmentations and meanings must still be evaluated from evidence. FieldWorks Language Explorer organizes the data and proposed relationships; using the software does not itself establish that an analysis of linguistic morphology is correct.

An interlinear gloss aligns a linguistic example with an analysis of the meanings or grammatical properties of its words and morphemes. It commonly combines an original-language line, a segmented line, analytical labels and a freer translation. The aligned analysis provides information that the translation alone can conceal.

The Leipzig Glossing Rules by Bernard Comrie and others specify word alignment, matching hyphens at segmentable morpheme boundaries, and abbreviated grammatical labels.^[ref] In the original English illustration walk-ed / walk-PST, PST identifies past grammatical tense; the matching hyphens connect the ending with its proposed contribution. The unsegmented surface form is walked.

A matching number of boundaries does not prove the segmentation correct. The rules explicitly distinguish the gloss from the original data: different analyses can describe the same recorded form. An interlinear gloss therefore makes claims about linguistic morphology inspectable while preserving the need for independent evidence about those claims.

Linguistic morphology studies how words are structured from morphemes and how their forms relate to grammatical functions and meaning. It distinguishes reusable patterns from merely splitting a spelling into arbitrary pieces. Spoken and signed languages can both have morphological structure.^[ref]

For example, replayed can be analyzed as re- plus play plus -ed: repetition and past marking combine with a lexical base. The segmentation predicts relationships with play, replay and played, rather than only describing one isolated word. Inflection marks grammatical alternatives, while derivational morphology can form new lexical items. A computational analyzer can represent permitted combinations with a finite-state machine; an analysis is useful when it generalizes to new forms while rejecting combinations outside the specified grammar.

SIL International is a language-focused organization whose name appears as the publisher of linguistic reference materials and software documentation. Its glossary distinguishes concepts such as grammatical tense, which locates a situation relative to a reference time, and grammatical aspect, which describes its temporal presentation.^[ref][ref]

Its language-technology work includes FieldWorks Language Explorer, software for organizing lexical entries, analyzing texts and describing grammar. An investigator can connect an observed word form with an analysis into morphemes, then compare that analysis across further recorded examples. Such tools make a proposed linguistic morphology inspectable; the stored analysis still needs evidence from language use.^[ref]