Morpheme

Amorphemeis the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression.The field oflinguisticstudy dedicated to morphemes is calledmorphology.

In English, morphemes are often butnot necessarilywords.Morphemes that stand alone are consideredroots(such as the morphemecat); other morphemes, calledaffixes,are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the-sincatsindicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind of plurality.

This distinction is not universal and does not apply to, for example,Latin,in which many roots cannot stand alone. For instance, the Latin rootreg-('king') must always be suffixed with a case marker:rex(reg-s),reg-is,reg-i,etc. For a language like Latin, a root can be defined as the main lexical morpheme of a word.

These sample English words have the following morphological analyses:

• "Unbreakable" is composed of three morphemes:un-(a bound morpheme signifying "not" ),break(the root, a free morpheme), and-able(a bound morpheme signifying "an ability to be done" ).
• The plural morpheme for regular nouns (-s) has threeallomorphs:it is pronounced/s/(e.g., incats/kæts/),/ɪz,əz/(e.g., indishes/dɪʃɪz/), and/z/(e.g., indogs/dɒɡz/), depending on the pronunciation of the root.

Classification

Free and bound morphemes

Main article:Bound and free morphemes

Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound:

• Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g.town,dog) and can appear withinlexemes(e.g.town hall,doghouse).
• Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with arootand sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example,un-appears only when accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, specificallyprefixesandsuffixes.Examples of suffixes are-tion,-sion,-tive,-ation,-ible,and-ing.Bound morphemes that are not affixed are calledcranberry morphemes.

Classification of bound morphemes

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional morphemes. The main difference between them is their function in relation to words.

Derivational bound morphemes

• Derivationalmorphemes, when combined with a root, change the semantic meaning or thepart of speechof the affected word. For example, in the wordhappiness,the addition of the bound morpheme-nessto the roothappychanges the word from anadjective(happy) to anoun(happiness). In the wordunkind,un-functions as a derivational morpheme since it inverts the meaning of the root morpheme (word)kind.Generally, morphemes that affix to a root morpheme (word) are bound morphemes.

Inflectional bound morphemes

• Inflectionalmorphemes modify thetense,aspect,mood,person,ornumberof averbor thenumber,grammaticalgender,orcaseof a noun, adjective, orpronounwithout affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding-sto the rootdogto formdogsand adding-edtowaitto formwaited.An inflectional morpheme changes the form of a word. English has eight inflections.

Allomorphs

Allomorphsare variants of a morpheme that differ in form but are semantically similar. For example, the English pluralmarkerhas three allomorphs:/-z/(bugs),/-s/(bats), or/-ɪz,-əz/(buses). An allomorph is a concrete realization of a morpheme, which is an abstract unit. That is parallel to the relation of anallophoneand aphoneme.

Zero-morpheme

Main article:Zero morpheme

A zero-morpheme is a type of morpheme that carriessemanticmeaning but is not represented byauditoryphoneme. A word with a zero-morpheme is analyzed as having the morpheme for grammatical purposes, but the morpheme is not realized in speech. They are often represented by /∅/ withinglosses.

Generally, such morphemes have no visible changes. For instance,sheepis both the singular and the plural form of that noun; rather than taking the usual plural suffix-sto form hypothetical*sheeps,the plural is analyzed as being composed ofsheep + -∅,the null plural suffix. The intended meaning is thus derived from theco-occurrencedeterminer (in this case, "some-" or "a-" ).

In some cases, a zero-morpheme may also be used to contrast with other inflected forms of a word that contain an audible morpheme. For example, the plural nouncatsin English consists of the rootcatand the plural suffix-s,and so the singularcatmay be analyzed as the root inflected with the null singular suffix -∅.

Content vs. function

Content morphemesexpress a concrete meaning orcontent,and function morphemes have more of a grammatical role. For example, the morphemesfastandsadcan be considered content morphemes. On the other hand, the suffix-edis a function morpheme since it has the grammatical function of indicatingpast tense.

Both categories may seem very clear and intuitive, but the idea behind them is occasionally more difficult to grasp since they overlap with each other.Examples of ambiguous situations are theprepositionoverand thedetermineryour,which seem to have concrete meanings but are considered function morphemes since their role is to connect ideas grammatically.Here is a general rule to determine the category of a morpheme:

• Content morphemes include free morphemes that are nouns,adverbs,adjectives,and main verbs and bound morphemes that are bound roots and derivational affixes.
• Function morphemes may be free morphemes that are prepositions,pronouns,determiners, auxiliary verbs andconjunctions.They may be bound morphemes that are inflectional affixes.

Other features

Roots are composed of only one morpheme, but stems can be composed of more than one morpheme. Any additional affixes are considered morphemes. For example, in the wordquirkiness,the root isquirk,but the stem isquirky,which has two morphemes.

Moreover, some pairs of affixes have identical phonological form but different meanings. For example, the suffix-ercan be either derivational (e.g.sell⇒seller) or inflectional (e.g.small⇒smaller). Such morphemes are calledhomophonous.

Some words might seem to be composed of multiple morphemes but are not. Therefore, not only form but also meaning must be considered when identifying morphemes. For example, the wordMadagascaris long and might seem to have morphemes likemad,gas,andcar,but it does not. Conversely, some short words have multiple morphemes (e.g.dogs=dog+s).

Morphological analysis

Innatural language processingforJapanese,Chinese,and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of morphemes. Morphological analysis is closely related topart-of-speech tagging,but word segmentation is required for those languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces.

The purpose of morphological analysis is to determine the minimal units of meaning in a language (morphemes) by comparison of similar forms: such as comparing "She is walking" and "They are walking" with each other, rather than either with something less similar like "You are reading". Those forms can be effectively broken down into parts, and the different morphemes can be distinguished.

Both meaning and form are equally important for the identification of morphemes. An agent morpheme is an affix like-erthat in English transforms a verb into a noun (e.g.teach→teacher). English also has another morpheme that is identical in pronunciation (and written form) but has an unrelated meaning and function: a comparative morpheme that changes an adjective into another degree of comparison (but remains the same adjective) (e.g.small→smaller). The opposite can also occur: a pair of morphemes with identical meaning but different forms.

Changing definitions

Ingenerative grammar,the definition of a morpheme depends heavily on whether syntactic trees have morphemes as leaves or features as leaves.

• Direct surface-to-syntaxmapping inlexical functional grammar(LFG) – leaves are words
• Direct syntax-to-semantics mapping
  • Leaves in syntactic trees spell out morphemes:distributed morphology– leaves are morphemes
  • Branches in syntactic trees spell out morphemes: radical minimalism andnanosyntax– leaves are "nano-" (small) morpho-syntactic features

Given the definition of a morpheme as "the smallest meaningful unit", nanosyntax aims to account for idioms in which an entire syntactic tree often contributes "the smallest meaningful unit". An exampleidiomis "Don't let the cat out of the bag". There, the idiom is composed of "let the cat out of the bag". That might be considered a semantic morpheme, which is itself composed of many syntactic morphemes. Other cases of the "smallest meaningful unit" being longer than a word include some collocations such as "in view of" and "business intelligence" in which the words, when together, have a specific meaning.

The definition of morphemes also plays a significant role in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following theoretical constructs:

• Event semantics:the idea that each productive morpheme must have a compositional semantic meaning (adenotation), and if the meaning is there, there must be a morpheme (whethernullor overt).
• Spell-out:the interface with which syntactic/semantic structures are "spelled out" by using words or morphemes with phonological content. That can also be thought of as lexical insertion into the syntactic.

See also

• Alternation (linguistics)
• Floating tone
• Hybrid word
• List of Greek morphemes used in English
• Morphological parsing
• Morphophonology
• Morphotactics
• Motif-Index of Folk-Literature,featuring a comparable concept in folklore studies
• Theoretical linguistics
• Word stem

References

• Baerman, Matthew (2015), Matthew Baerman (ed.),The Morpheme,Stephen R. Anderson, Oxford University: Oxford University Press, p. 3
• Plag, Ingo (2015),The structure of words: morphology,Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Maria Braun, and Mareile Schramm, Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter, Inc., pp. 71–112

External links

• Glossary of reading terms
• Comprehensive and searchable morpheme reference
• Linguistics 001 — Lecture 7 — Morphologyby Mark Lieberman
• Pronunciation of the word morphemeArchived2011-07-17 at theWayback Machine