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A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression.[1] The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme cat); other morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the -s in cats indicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind of plurality.[2]
This distinction is not universal and does not apply to, for example, Latin, in which many roots cannot stand alone. For instance, the Latin root reg- ('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").[3][4][5]
The plural morpheme for regular nouns (-s) has three allomorphs: it is pronounced /s/ (e.g., in cats/kæts/), /ɪz,əz/ (e.g., in dishes/dɪʃɪz/), and /z/ (e.g., in dogs/dɒɡz/), depending on the pronunciation of the root.
^Haspelmath, Martin (2010). Understanding Morphology. Andrea D. Sims (2nd ed.). London: Hodder Education. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-340-95001-2. OCLC 671004133.
^Kemmer, Suzanne. "Structure". Words in English. Retrieved 10 April 2014.
^"Word Grabber For Morpheme - Vocabulary List". Vocabulary.com.
^user318260; Lawler, John; herisson (Oct 1, 2018). "grammar - Why isn't {-able} considered a free morpheme?". English Language & Usage Stack Exchange. Archived from the original on Oct 24, 2023.
English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme cat); other morphemes, called...
bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression, while a free morpheme (or unbound...
Morphemization is a term describing the process of creating a new morpheme using existing linguistic material. Silver used the term for fused words, or...
linguistic morphology a cranberry morpheme (also called unique morpheme or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an independent...
In morphology, a null morpheme or zero morpheme is a morpheme that has no phonetic form. In simpler terms, a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix. It...
root). A word-final segment that is somewhere between a free morpheme and a bound morpheme is known as a suffixoid or a semi-suffix (e.g., English -like...
a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples...
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are derivational and inflectional...
analysis and description of the structure of morphemes and other units of meaning in the Odia language. Morphemes (called ରୁପିମ) are the smallest units of...
contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot...
called phonemes—Chinese characters correspond to morphemes, a language's smallest units of meaning. Morphemes in Chinese are usually a single syllable in length...
Greek morphemes are parts of words originating from the Greek language. This article lists Greek morphemes used in the English language. English words...
'To Me You're Beautiful'. Loan-translations: words are translated morpheme by morpheme, or component by component, into another language. Semantic calques...
linguistics, functional morphemes, also sometimes referred to as functors, are building blocks for language acquisition. A functional morpheme (as opposed to a...
A content morpheme or contentive morpheme is a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word. Content morphemes have lexical denotations that...
In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning...
uses agglutination. In an agglutinative language, words contain multiple morphemes concatenated together, but in such a manner that individual word stems...
morpheme, which is the smallest unit of language that has a meaning, even if it cannot stand on its own. Words are made out of at least one morpheme....
language is a language that is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. Rule-wise, a synthetic language is characterized by denoting...
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example,...
morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that...
backformed from Greek ἐγκλιτικός enklitikós "leaning" or "enclitic") is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically...
phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words. Morphophonological...
used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances...
one-to-one with a morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that a morphemes are monosyllabic—in...
meaning called morphemes, according to root morpheme + derivational morphemes + affix (not necessarily in that order), where: The root morpheme is the primary...
A morphogram is the representation of a morpheme by a grapheme based solely on its meaning. Kanji is a writing system that makes use of morphograms, where...
that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms...
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