Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. A morpheme is made up of phoneme(s) (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound) within spoken language and by grapheme(s) (the smallest units of written language) within written language.

The concept of word and morpheme are different, as a morpheme may or may not stand alone. One or several morphemes compose a word. A morpheme is known as a free-morpheme if it can stand alone (ex: "one", "possible"), or as a bound-morpheme if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme (ex: "im" in impossible). Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the different morphs ("in-", "im-") representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.

English example:

The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-", a bound morpheme; "break", a free morpheme; and "-able", a free morpheme. "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both "un-" and "-able" are affixes.

The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", /s/, in cats (/kæts/), but "-es", /ɨz/, in dishes (/dɪʃɨz/), and even the voiced "-s", /z/, in dogs (/dɒɡz/). "-s". These are allomorphs.

Types of morphemes

• Free morphemes, such as town and dog, can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, i.e. "free".
• Bound morphemes such as "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.
• Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness." They carry semantic information.
• Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on, without deriving a new word or a word in a new grammatical category (as in the "dog" morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme "-s" becomes "dogs"). They carry grammatical information.
• Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as /-z/, /-s/ or /-ɨz/.

Other morepheme variants

• Null morpheme
• Root morpheme
• Word stem

Morphological analysis

In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese and other languages, morphological analysis is a 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 analysers include Juman, ChaSen and Mecab.

See also

Linguistics

• International Phonetic Alphabet
• Hybrid word
• Alternation (linguistics)
• Theoretical linguistics
• Marker (linguistics)
• Morphological parsing

Lexicology

• Greek morphemes
• Lexeme
• Morphophonology
• Chereme
• Grapheme
• Phoneme
• Sememe
• Floating tone

References

• Spencer, Andrew (1992). Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

External links

• Glossary of Reading Terms
• Comprehensive and searchable morpheme reference
• Linguistics 001 — Lecture 7 — Morphology by Prof. Mark Lieberman
• Morphemes — A New Threat to Society: A humorous look at morphemes. Accurate, but purposely confuses morphemes with narcotics (i.e., "morphine").
• Morpheme Study Aid