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. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs 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 bound 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", [ɪz], in dishes ([dɪʃɪz]), and even the voiced "-s", [z], in dogs ([dɒgz]). "-s" might even turn into "-ren" ([rɪn]) in children.
Types of morphemes
- Free morphemes like 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 (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.
- 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 (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 [-
ɪz].
Other variants
Morphological analysis
In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese and other languages, morphological analysis is a process of segmenting 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 MecabSee also
- International Phonetic Alphabet
- Hybrid word
- Alternation (linguistics)
- Lexeme
- Morphophonology
- Chereme
- Grapheme
- Phoneme
- Sememe
- Floating tone
- Theoretical linguistics
- Marker (linguistics)
- Morphological parsing
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
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Last updated on Saturday October 04, 2008 at 01:32:16 PDT (GMT -0700)
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