Morpheme
In
morpheme-based morphology, a
morpheme is the smallest lingual 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 "unbreakable" has three morphemes "un-", (negatory) 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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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 /-/.
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Bound morphemes like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Morphemes existing in only one bound form are known as "cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word.
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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).
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Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."
Other variants
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Cranberry morpheme*
Null morpheme*
Root morpheme*
Prefix morpheme*
Suffix morpheme*
Morphophonology*
Chereme*
Grapheme*
Phoneme*
Sememe*
Floating tone*
Theoretical linguistics*
University of Oregon Linguistics Course: The Structure of English Words (LING150)*
Morpheme Study Aid
