Languages & Linguistics
Morphemes
Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. They can be words or parts of words, such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots. Understanding morphemes is essential for analyzing the structure and meaning of words in different languages.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
12 Key excerpts on "Morphemes"
eBook - PDFLinguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing
100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax
- Emily M. Bender(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Springer(Publisher)
CHAPTER 2 Morphology: Introduction #7 Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language, usually consisting of a sequence of phones paired with concrete meaning. Morphology is the subfield oflinguistics concerned with the formation and internal structure of words. It encompasses morphotactics, or questions of which Morphemes are allowed to combine within a word and in what order; morphophonology, how the form of Morphemes is conditioned by other Morphemes they combine with; and morphosyntax, how the Morphemes in a word affect its combinatoric potential. 1 In all three cases, the units under consideration are Morphemes, which can be defined as the smallest meaningful units oflanguage. A morpheme is typically a sequence of phones (sounds) paired with a concrete meaning. 2 A simple example is given in (6) where the boundaries between Morphemes (with words) are indicated by'+': (6) Morpheme+s are the small+est mean+ing+ful unit+s oflanguage. This example, however, belies the actual complexity of morphological systems. As described be- low, both the 'form' and the 'meaning' part of the pairing can vary from the prototypes in impor- tant ways. Specifically, the form can be made up of phones which are not contiguous (#8), it can be made up of something other than phones (#9), it can in fact be null (#10), and finally the form can vary with the linguistic context (#23-#26). On the meaning side, in addition to core lexical meaning (#11), Morphemes can convey changes to that meaning (#12) (which furthermore can be idiosyncratic (#13)) and/or syntactically or semantically relevant features (#14, #28-#43) #8 The phones making up a morpheme don't have to be contiguous. While prototypical Morphemes are sequences of phones (sounds, represented by letters in alphabetic writing systems) which furthermore have easily identified boundaries between them, there are several ways in which Morphemes can depart from this prototypical case.
eBook - PDF- Christina Schoushkoff(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Society Publishing(Publisher)
Morphological structure of the word: Morpheme is the minimum meaningful language unit, constituent part of words, not independent, not divided into smaller meaningful units. Root morpheme—lexical nucleus of the word. It has a very general and abstract lexical meaning, common to a set of semantically related words, constituting one word cluster. Besides lexical meaning, root Morphemes possess other types of meaning, proper to Morphemes, except the part-of-speech meaning, which is not found in roots. Affixational Morphemes, which are divided into inflexional affixes (inflexions) and derivational affixes (prefixes and suffixes). They are lexically dependent on the root they modify. Inflexions carry only grammatical meaning and are relevant only for the formation of word forms. Derivational affixes are relevant for building various types of words. Morphemes could be: Free —coincide with word forms of independently functioning words. Free Morphemes can be found only among roots. For example, boy, undesirable, screensaver Bound —do not coincide with independently functioning words. These are prefixes and suffixes. For example, -un, -able, -er, -dis, re-Allomorph —positional variant of morpheme occurring in the specific environment and characterized by complementary distribution. For example, allomorphs of prefix in-: il—(illegal, illogical), im— (impossible, impolite), ir—(irregular, irrational) Between the inflexions allomorphs also occur (variants of pronunciation of plural ending -s, ending -ed). According to number of Morphemes words are classified into monomorphic and polymorphic. Monomorphic (root) word consists of only one root morpheme (cat, book, Morphology 67 and knife). Polymorphic words are divided into: a) Derived words, which are composed of one root morpheme and one or several derivational Morphemes (disagree, illness, impossibility, and unlikely). b) Compound words contain at least two root Morphemes and number of derivational Morphemes is insignificant.
eBook - PDFThe Semantics of Derivational Morphology
A Synchronic and Diachronic Investigation of the Suffixes -age and -ery in English
- Marion Schulte(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Narr Francke Attempto Verlag(Publisher)
Even affixational processes raise questions as to their supposed unity of form and meaning, as the following discussion will show. It is therefore fair to conclude that the morpheme as the smallest meaningful unit of lan-guage is a problematic notion. Carstairs-McCarthy (2005: 22) even says that it is an understandable position if some linguists “conclude that the term 'morpheme' has hindered rather than helped our understanding of how morphology works”. According to him there have been different reactions to this problem in recent years: some scholars continue to use the term mor-pheme , but “some or all Morphemes are explicitly not regarded as Saussure-an signs” (Carstairs-McCarty 2005: 20), others continue to use it without “much theoretical weight being attached to it” (ibid.), and a third group does no longer use the term at all. In this study, the term morpheme will be avoided, as it seems to raise more questions than it answers. If it occurs, it will not have any theoretical value, i.e. I will not use it to comment on the sign-like status of morphological elements. 2.1.1 Morpheme-based Accounts and Affixes Although the traditional definition of the morpheme is at the very least problematic, one could argue that affixes may still be considered form-and-meaning units, as most of the problems concerning the morpheme are posed by non-affixational word formation processes. One of the issues mentioned above that also pertains to affixes is their polyfunctionality. The same affix can often be found in derivatives with a range of meanings, but different affixes also seem to give rise to very similar derivatives. The suffix -age , for example, can be found in derivatives denot-ing locations ( orphanage ), collectives ( baggage ), actions ( creepage ), amounts ( mileage ), or states ( victimage ). Derivatives of -ery have a similar range of meanings and refer to locations ( eatery ), collectives ( blossomry ), actions ( milk-soppery ), or states ( smuggery ).
eBook - PDF- Bruce Hayes, Bruce P. Hayes(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
5 Morphology 5.1 Basics of Morphology Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the structure of words. There are many interactions, often complex, between phonological form and morphological structure, covered in chapters 6–8. The purpose of this chapter is to cover enough morphology to provide the groundwork for later material. In studying the structure of words there are two basic goals: to isolate the com- ponent parts of words, and to determine the rules by which words are formed. For the first task, it is useful to make use of the term morpheme, defined as the smallest linguistic unit that bears a meaning. One can often break up a word into its component Morphemes by peeling off one morpheme at a time, like this: unidentifiability = unidentifiable + ity ‘the quality of being unidentifiable’ unidentifiable = un + identifiable ‘not identifiable’ identifiable = identify + able ‘able to be identified’ identify = ident + ify ‘to associate with an identity’ (?) Result: un + ident + ify + able + ity The stages of decomposition seen above can all be justified by appealing to other words that have the same pattern, for example the division of unidentifiability into unidentifiable + ity is supported by parallel examples like obscur-ity, pur- ity, and obes-ity, and similarly for the other stages (un-clear, un-willing; sell-able, visit-able; class-ify, person-ify). Morphemes are not the same as phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest lin- guistic unit that can distinguish meaning, whereas a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has a meaning. This is illustrated in the following example: tacking tagging Allophones: [t h æk(º] [t h æg(º] Phonemes: /tæk}º/ /tæg}º/ Morphemes: /tæk/ + /}º/ /tæg/ + /}º/ 104 Morphology 5.2 Formal Types of Morphemes Most words can be analyzed as having a central morpheme, to which the remaining Morphemes are attached.
eBook - PDFLinguistics for Everyone
An Introduction
- Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Hear children making onomatopoeic sounds in their language at http:// www.bzzzpeek.com. Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 144 • CHAPTER 5 Morphology: Words and Their Parts This nonsense sentence illustrates that we have knowledge of Morphemes—of words and meaningful parts of words—and that we use this knowledge to determine a number of things: the syntac-tic category of the word, whether the word is plural or singular, or whether it is in the past or present tense. A morpheme is often described as the smallest unit of meaning in a word. On this logic, there are two Morphemes in the word pancake , namely, pan and cake , both of which have rather obvious, recognizable meanings, and both of which are words by themselves. Other Morphemes have meaning, too, though perhaps not in the dictionary sense. English speakers would probably all agree that there are three Morphemes in waspishness ( wasp , -ish , and -ness ). We can say that the Morphemes -ish and -ness have meaning because we recognize them as parts of words we easily combine with other parts to create words such as pinkish and happiness , and we also know that -ish and -ness can’t be combined with run or work to cre-ate * runnish or *workness . So, although we might have difficulty defining the term word , we certainly know what a morpheme is, and we also know a complex set of rules that allow us to combine Morphemes to create larger, meaningful units.
eBook - PDFEnglish Words
History and Structure
- Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Morphology (1870): the study of the structure, form, or variation in form (including word-formation, change, and inflection) of a word or words in a language. Topics from English lexicology and lexicography are discussed elsewhere in this book; here we concentrate on Morphemes and their properties. 1.2 The properties of Morphemes -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We summarize below the properties of Morphemes in an effort to show how they differ from other linguistic units like syllables, words, and individual 1 The smallest meaningful units 65 sounds. The properties which uniquely differentiate Morphemes from other linguis- tic units are these: (1) A morpheme is the smallest unit associated with a meaning. As an example, consider the following words: car care carpet cardigan carpal caress carve caramel carrot carbon caribou scarlet baccarat mascara myocardial Oscar vicar scare discard placard Each of these words contains the spelling . How can we determine whether this fact is significant or not? Answer: Ask whether there is some constant meaning in each word that can be attributed to a morpheme having the form . It is obvious that care has nothing to do with car – the meaning of car is completely independent of the meaning of care. Take caress: although superficially caress resembles car the way princess resem- bles prince, there is clearly no shared meaning in the first pair. Carpet, on the other hand, looks as though somehow (imaginably) there might be a connec- tion: perhaps carpet could be a little carp (as tablet is a little table), but of course it is not, nor is carpal, an adjective, ‘relating to the wrist,’ a ride-sharing friend. Carpet is a single morpheme, and can be written √carpet. We can also write √care, √carve, √caribou, √baccarat, √Oscar, √cardigan, √carrot, √caress, √caramel, √scare, and √vicar, following the same logic in each instance.
eBook - PDF- Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
One of the most important functions of morphology is to distinguish the roles played by the various participants in an event; we could not interpret language without this information. In the remainder of this chapter, we will examine some other functions of morphology, and also take a closer look at some key terms and concepts that linguists use to describe the processes of morphology. Morphemes We said earlier that tea and teas are both words with slightly different meanings, and that this difference is due to the -s ending on teas . But since -s is not itself a word, how can it have its own meaning? In fact, it is not words, but rather Morphemes , that are the smallest units of language that combine both a form (the way they sound) and a meaning (what they mean). Words are made up of Morphemes. Simple words consist of a single morpheme. Complex words consist of more than one morpheme. For example, cat is a simple word compared with cats , which contains two Morphemes – the noun cat plus a plural 68 Donna Lardiere marker -s . Similarly, in the word unfriendly , there are three Morphemes: un-, friend , and -ly , each of which contributes some meaning to the overall word. Some words in morphologic-ally rich languages can contain so many Morphemes that we need an entire complex sentence in English to translate them. Consider the following complex word from Turkish, which contains the lexical root Avrupa -‘ Europe ’ plus eleven additional Morphemes (don ’ t worry for now about the function of each morpheme as glossed below the word): (11) Turkish (Beard 1995 : 56) Avrupal ı la ş t ı r ı lamayacaklardans ı n ı z Avrupa-l ı -la ş -t ı r-ı l-a-ma-yacak-lar-dan-s ı n-ı z Europe-an-ize-CAUSE -PASSIVE -POTENTIAL -NEG -FUT . PART -PL -ABL -2 ND -PL ‘ You (all) are among those who will not be able to be caused to become like Europeans.
- Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
The word is derived from the Greek word morphe, meaning “form.” If Goldwyn had taken a linguistics course, he would have said, more correctly, “In two Morphemes: im-possible.” The study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words are formed, is morphology. This word itself consists of two Morphemes, morph 1 ology. The morpheme -ology means “branch of knowledge,” so the meaning of morphology is “the branch of knowledge concerning (word) forms.” Morphol- ogy also refers to our internal grammatical knowledge concerning the words of our language, and like most linguistic knowledge we are not consciously aware of it. A single word may be composed of one or more Morphemes: One morpheme boy desire meditate two Morphemes boy 1 ish desire 1 able meditate 1 tion three Morphemes boy 1 ish 1 ness desire 1 able 1 ity four Morphemes gentle 1 man 1 li 1 ness un 1 desire 1 able 1 ity more than four un 1 gentle 1 man 1 li 1 ness anti 1 dis 1 establish 1 ment 1 ari 1 an 1 ism Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 38 CHAPTER 2 Morphology: The Words of Language A morpheme may be represented by a single letter such as the morpheme a- meaning “without” as in amoral and asexual, or by a single syllable, such as child and ish in child 1 ish. A morpheme may also consist of more than one syllable: of two syllables, as in camel, lady, and water; of three syllables, as in Hackensack and crocodile; or of four or more syllables, as in hallucinate, apoth- ecary, helicopter, and accelerate.
eBook - PDFProductivity and Creativity
Studies in General and Descriptive Linguistics in Honor of E. M. Uhlenbeck
- Mark Janse(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The morpheme in Bloomfield's Language Pierre Swiggers Morphology, the study of word-structure (or, the analysis into form-meaning units), deals with a wide range of phenomena, from alter-nations in phonetic shape affecting units above the phoneme level to processes of word-compounding, and even syntactic properties of form classes or phrases. The linguist as well as the layman resort to the notion of the word, which defies all attempts at a satisfactory and linguistically interesting definition (i.e. a definition that would take the word as a unit of grammatical structure, not as an item in the dictionary). As Uhlenbeck judiciously remarks (1992: 246), this state of affairs (rather frustrating for the linguist) should be given due recognition: Linguistic units, probably because of their pragmatic and functional character, are notoriously difficult to define. For the sentence as well as for the word, many definitions have been proposed; but so far none has gained general acceptance ... This lack of consensus among linguists stands in sharp contrast to the general agreement of native speakers everywhere, who seem convinced that they have words at their disposal for daily use in actual speech. The search for elements, which in languages written down in an alphabetic script, had soon yielded an analysis bringing out what can be properly called phonemic units, was hampered on the higher levels by the availability of the intersectional unit which is the word, 1 offering itself as a straightforwardly identifiable unit if one adopts a semiotically based conception of language (i.e. one in which speech is seen as the expression of thought by means of vocal symbols, the combination of the latter expressing the combination of ideas which constitute the thought).
eBook - PDFEnglish Language, The
From Sound to Sense
- Gerald P. Delahunty, James J. Garvey(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Parlor Press, LLC(Publisher)
f. A morpheme is basically the same as: i. a letter ii. a sound iii. a group of sounds iv. none of the above 3. The words district and discipline show that the sequence of letters d-i-s does not always constitute a morpheme. (Analogous examples are mis sion, mis sile, be gin, and re trofit. ) List five more sequences of let-ters that are sometimes a morpheme and sometimes not. 4. Just for fun, find some other pairs like disgruntled / * gruntled and disgusted / * gusted , where one member of the pair is an actual English word and the other should be a word, but isn’t. Affixes are classified according to whether they are attached before or after the form to which they are added. Prefixes are attached before and suffixes after. The bound Morphemes listed earlier are all suffixes; the {re-} of resaw is a prefix. Further examples of prefixes and suffixes are presented in Appendix A at the end of this chapter. Root, derivational, and inflectional Morphemes Besides being bound or free, Morphemes can also be classified as root, deri-vational, or inflectional. A root morpheme is the basic form to which other Delahunty and Garvey 124 Morphemes are attached. It provides the basic meaning of the word.The morpheme {saw} is the root of sawers . Derivational Morphemes are added to forms to create separate words: {-er} is a derivational suffix whose ad-dition turns a verb into a noun, usually meaning the person or thing that performs the action denoted by the verb. For example, {paint}+{-er} creates painter , one of whose meanings is “someone who paints.” Inflectional Morphemes do not create separate words. They merely modify the word in which they occur in order to indicate grammatical prop-erties such as plurality, as the {-s} of magazine s does, or past tense, as the {ed} of babecu ed does. English has eight inflectional Morphemes, which we will describe below.
eBook - PDFMorphology
From Data to Theories
- Antonio Fábregas, Sergio Scalise(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
1 1 MORPHOLOGY: DEFINITIONS AND BASIC CONCEPTS 1.1 WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY? In this first section of the book we will illustrate some basic notions in morphology. What does morphology study? What are the goals of morphological analysis? What is its place within the general theory of grammar? 1.1.1 ITS OBJECT OF STUDY Morphology is the part of linguistics that studies the grammatical properties of words and how words are related to each other in a language. Indeed, the central task of morphology is to study how words such as the pair in (1) are related to each other. (1) a. deep b. deepen (1b) is intuitively more complex than (1a). On the formal side, it contains an addi-tional segment ( -en ), and on the semantic side, it has a more complex meaning that presupposes the meaning of (1a): ‘become deep’ or ‘cause something to become deep’. In this case a morphological analysis would tell us that the word in (1b) is the result of applying some operation to the word in (1a). Thus, (1a) is the base from which the word in (1b) has been built. The word in (1a) is simple; the word in (1b) is complex. In general, part of the phonology and meaning and some of the grammatical proper-ties of a complex word are expected to be explained by the characteristics of its base. A complex word like the one in (1b) can be decomposed into two different units: deep and -en . These units are Morphemes, which are traditionally defined as the smallest meaningful elements that are combined in order to build words. In clear cases, like the example in (1b), Morphemes are pairs of form and meaning. Deep is a morpheme that denotes a property having to do with a physical dimension; -en is a morpheme that forms verbs and is associated with the meaning ‘(cause to) become X’, where X is the property expressed by the other morpheme. The units that have been identified in morphological analysis, and that have been claimed to be useful to relate words to each other, are analyzed in Chapter 2 of this book.
eBook - PDF- Olga Akhmanova(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Taxonomies of this kind are 'ethno-centric' and are useless in the quest for linguistic universals. Of great interest are comparative-historical investigations which show that there are no distinct lines between derivation and inflexion from a diachronic point of view. In the history of language there are constant transitions from the former into the latter. (Very interesting illustrations are found in J. Kurytowicz, On the Meth-ods of Internal Reconstruction, Proc. of the 9th Intern. Congr. of Linguists, 17). 3.2.3 Inflectional Morphemes and Morphology in the Narrow Sense The 'lexical' (or 'root-', 'source-') Morphemes are like words in many respects. They are endowed, to a greater or less degree, with the power of individual reference. They are often polyseman-tic, in a lexical sense. It is true, that derivational Morphemes do not possess these qualities in the same marked degree, that many of them are on the border-line between lexical and grammatical morphology. Nevertheless (as will be shown later) it is not only possible, but also necessary to distinguish between derivational and inflexional Morphemes as a matter of principle. A more detailed discussion of the field with its specific problems 102 MORPHOLOGY should be preceded by some metalinguistic clarification. First of all the term 'grammatical' which is a complex bundle of concepts : (1) expressing relationship; (2) systemic, standard, recurring; (3) auxiliary, concomitant in form. It follows that grammatical mor-phology deals with units (and processes?) (1) connected with the expression of relations between objects; (2) connected with rela-tions, expressed by means of regular, standard recurrent devices; and (3) auxiliary, concomitant subservient with respect to the 'material' (vescestvennoj) or 'lexical' part of words. The morphonological processes of lexical morphology are com-paratively speaking simple, even for most of the phenomena of derivation.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
