Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members.

English example: The word "unbelievable" has three morphemes "un-", (negatory) a bound morpheme, "-believe-" a free morpheme, and "-able". "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.

Contents

Types of morphemes

  • Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town-hall or dog-house) or they can stand alone, or "free". Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as /-z/, /-s/ or /-Iz/.
  • Bound morphemes like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes.
  • Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on.
  • Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy", for example, to give "happiness".

Reference

  • Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory, Blackwell, Oxford 1992

See also

External links

cy:Morffem de:Morphem eo:Morfemo fa:تکواژ fr:Morphme he:מורפמה ko:형태소 io:Morfemo nl:Morfeem ja:形態素 pl:Morfem pt:Morfema ru:Морфема sv:Morfem zh:基本词汇

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