ABSTRACT
Morphology is concerned with the internal structure of words - their form and composition. Cantonese would be described typologically as an isolating language, following a tradition developed in the nineteenth century and popularized by Sapir, whereby languages are classified as inflectional, agglutinating or isolating in their word structure. None the less, the paucity or simplicity of morphology in Chinese has often been exaggerated, partly as a result of comparison with European languages and partly through the perception that each written character represents an independent word. Some morphemes are free, that is they can occur independently as a word while others are bound, that is, they cannot occur independently but have to attach to another morpheme. In many words which in Mandarin require the suffix -tou, the Cantonese -tauh is optional; in others, both Mandarin and Cantonese require the suffix.
