'For English, [morphology] means devising ways of describing the properties of such disparate items as a, horse, took, indescribable, washing machine, and antidisestablishmentarianism. A widely recognized approach divides the field into two domains: lexical or derivational morphology studies the way in which new items of vocabulary can be built up out of combinations of elements (as in the case of in-describ-able); inflectional morphology studies the ways words vary in their form in order to express a grammatical contrast (as in the case of horses, where the ending marks plurality).' ('The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language,' 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003)
'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....No matter what language we're looking at, we need analytic methods that are independent of the structures we are examining; preconceived notions might interfere with an objective, scientific analysis. This is especially true when dealing with unfamiliar languages.
'The second approach to morphology is more often associated with theory than with methodology, perhaps unfairly. This is the synthetic approach. It basically says, 'I have a lot of little pieces here. How do I put them together?' This question presupposes that you already know what the pieces are. Analysis must in some way precede synthesis.' (Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman, 'What Is Morphology?' 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)