Which component deals with the smallest units of meaning in words?

• A. Morphology
• B. Phonology
• C. Pragmatics
• D. Lexical Semantics

Answer: (A)

The main idea here is how words are built from meaningful parts. The smallest units of meaning in words are morphemes, and morphology is the study of how those morphemes come together to form words. This includes roots, prefixes, suffixes, and inflectional endings, and it explains how adding or changing these parts changes a word’s meaning or grammatical function. For example, in a word like unhappy, the morphemes are un- and -y (or the root happy with the prefix un-), and morphology analyzes how these units combine to create a new word with a different meaning.

Phonology, by contrast, deals with sounds and their patterns; pragmatics focuses on language use in context and the speaker’s intended meaning; lexical semantics looks at word meanings and relationships at the level of words. That's why morphology is the best answer for the smallest meaningful units in words.