Page "Morphology (linguistics)" Paragraph 46

In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes.

A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language.

In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in -, depend ,-ent, and ly ; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.

In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that-s is an inflectional morpheme.

In its simplest ( and most naïve ) form, this way of analyzing word forms treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement.

More modern and sophisticated approaches seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenative, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for Item-and-Arrangement theories and similar approaches.