The author analyses the views of scholars, belonging to different trends in linguistics, on the morphological level in the language. The development of ideas on the problem is being traced from comparative-historical linguistics to cognitive linguistics. In the theory of comparative-historical linguistics, the morphemic structure was considered to be a pure linguistic mechanism. The representatives of neogrammarians tried to fill the morphological meaning with syntactical terms. Generative morphology didn’t differentiate lexical, morphological and word-formation rules that resulted in identification of morphology and word-formation. The post-generative paradigm extended the research field of morphology, taking into consideration its functional aspect. The most successive line in investigating morphology is characteristic for Russian linguists. They treat morphology as a framework of the language system. Special attention is paid to the views of A.V. Bondarko, N.N. Boldyrev, E.S. Kubryakova, and Yu.S. Stepanov on morphology. The author concludes that it’s necessary to distinguish between such notions as “specific character of morphology” and “autonomy of morphology”. Finally, the author suggests her own approach to the investigation of morphology in a cognitive perspective.