Morpheme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.
In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes, the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound.
The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme.
- English example:
The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-" (meaning not x), a bound morpheme; "-break-", a free morpheme; and "-able". "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.
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[edit] 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".
- Bound morphemes (or affixes) like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Unproductive, non-affix morphemes that exist only in bound form are known as "cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word.
- Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on (as in the dog morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme s becomes dogs).
- Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."
- Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as [-z], [-s] or [- ɪz].
[edit] Other variants
[edit] Morphological analysis
In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a given sentence into a row of morphemes. It is closely related to Part-of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for these languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces. Famous Japanese morphological analysts include Juman and Chasen.
[edit] References
Spencer, Andrew (1992). Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
[edit] See also
- Alternation (linguistics)
- Lexeme
- Morphophonology
- Chereme
- Grapheme
- Phoneme
- Sememe
- Floating tone
- Theoretical linguistics
[edit] External links
- Morpheme Study Aid
- Morphemes--A New Threat to Society: A humorous look at morphemes. Accurate, but purposely confuses morphemes with narcotics (i.e., "morphine").
