Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical of speech of the affected word. For example, in
unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest mean- the word happiness, the addition of the bound mor-
ingful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to pheme -ness to the root happy changes the word
morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness).
identical to a word, and the principal difference between In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational
the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word
whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. When it formed by the root kind.
stands by itself, it is considered a root because it has a
meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when
it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is Inflectional morphemes
an affix because it has a grammatical function (e.g. the
• Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense or a
–s in cats to specify that it is plural).[1] Every word com-
noun’s number without affecting the word’s mean-
prises one or more morphemes. The more combinations
ing or class. Examples of applying inflectional mor-
a morpheme is found in, the more productive it is said to
phemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to
be.[2]
form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. In
English, there are eight inflections.

1 Classification of morphemes
1.2 Allomorphs
1.1 Free and bound Morphemes
Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in
Every morpheme can be classified as either free or pronunciation but are semantically identical. For exam-
bound.[3] These categories are mutually exclusive, and ple, in English, the plural marker -(e)s of regular nouns
as such, a given morpheme will belong to exactly one of can be pronounced /-z/, /-s/, or /-ɨz/, depending on the
them. final sound of the noun’s singular form.

• Free morphemes can function independently as 1.3 Content vs. function

words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear with other
lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse). Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or con-
• Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, tent, while function morphemes have more of a grammat-
always in conjunction with a root and sometimes ical role. For example, the morphemes fast and sad can
with other bound morphemes. For example, un- be considered content morphemes. On the other hand,
appears only accompanied by other morphemes to the suffix –ed belongs to the function morphemes given
form a word. Most bound morphemes in English that it has the grammatical function of indicating past
are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes, exam- tense. Although these categories seem very clear and in-
ples of suffixes are: tion, ation, ible, ing, etc. Bound tuitive, the idea behind it can be
[4]
harder to grasp given that
morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry they overlap with each other. Examples of an ambigu-
morphemes. ous situation are the preposition over and the determiner
your, which seem to have a concrete meaning, but are
considered function morphemes because their role is to
1.1.1 Classification of Bound morphemes connect ideas grammatically.[5] A general rule to follow
to determine the category of a morpheme is:
Bound morphemes can be further classified as deriva-
tional or inflectional. • Content morphemes include free morphemes that
are nouns, adverbs, adjective, and verbs. It also in-
cludes bound morphemes that are bound roots and
Derivational morphemes derivational affixes.[5]
• Derivational morphemes, when combined with a • Function morphemes can be free morphemes
root, change either the semantic meaning or part that are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and

1
2 5 SEE ALSO

conjunctions. Additionally, they can be bound mor- fix like -er that transforms a verb into a noun (e.g. teach
phemes that are inflectional affixes.[5] ⇒ teacher). On the other hand, –er can also be a com-
parative morpheme that changes an adjective into another
degree of the same adjective (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). In
this case, the form is the same, but the meaning of both
2 Additional notes morphemes is different. Also, the opposite can occur in
which the meaning is the same but the form is different.[5]
First, roots are composed of only one morpheme while
stems can be composed of more than one morpheme.
Also, any additional affixes are considered morphemes.
An example of this is the word quirkiness. The root is
4 Changing definitions of mor-
quirk, but the stem is quirky which has two morphemes. pheme
Second, another thing to take in consideration is that there
might be affixes that have the same phonological form, In generative grammar, the definition of a morpheme de-
but have different meaning. For example, the suffix –er pends heavily on whether syntactic trees have morphemes
can be derivative (e.g. wonder ⇒ wonderer) or inflec- as leaves or features as leaves.
tional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). These types of morphemes
are called homophonous.[5]
• Direct surface to syntax mapping LFG – leaves are
A final factor to keep in consideration is to not be con- words
fused by monomorphemic words, which contain only one
morpheme. For instance, some words might seem to be • Direct syntax to semantics mapping
composed of multiple morphemes, but in fact they are
not. This is why we have to consider form and mean- • Leaves in syntactic trees spell out morphemes:
ing when searching for morphemes. For example, we Distributed morphology – leaves are mor-
might think that the word relate is composed of two mor- phemes
phemes, re- (prefix) and the word late, but this is not cor- • Branches in syntactic trees spell out mor-
rect. It has no relationship with the definitions relevant to phemes: Radical Minimalism and Nanosyntax
the word like “feel sympathy”, “narrate”, or “being con- – leaves are “nano” morpho-syntactic features
nected by blood or marriage”. Furthermore, the length
of the words does not determine if it has multiple mor-
Given the definition of morpheme as “the smallest mean-
phemes or not. To demonstrate, the word Madagascar
ingful unit” Nanosyntax aims to account for idioms where
is long and it might seem to have morphemes like mad,
it is often an entire syntactic tree which contributes “the
gas, and car, but it does not. Conversely, small words can
smallest meaningful unit.” An example idiom is “Don't
have multiple morphemes (e.g. dogs).[5]
let the cat out of the bag” where the idiom is composed
of “let the cat out of the bag” and that might be consid-
ered a semantic morpheme, which is composed of many
3 Morphological analysis syntactic morphemes. Other cases where the “smallest
meaningful unit” is larger than a word include some col-
In natural language processing for Korean, Japanese, locations such as “in view of” and “business intelligence”
Chinese and other languages, morphological analysis is where the words together have a specific meaning.
the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of mor- The definition of morphemes also plays a significant role
phemes. Morphological analysis is closely related to part- in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following
of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for theoretical constructs;
these languages because word boundaries are not indi-
cated by blank spaces. • Event semantics: the idea that each productive mor-
The purpose of morphological analysis is to determine pheme must have a compositional semantic mean-
the minimal units of meaning in a language or morphemes ing (a denotation), and if the meaning is there, there
by using comparisons of similar forms. For example, must be a morpheme (null or overt).
comparing forms such as “She is walking” and “They
are walking” rather than comparing any of the previ- • Spell-out: the interface where syntactic/semantic
ous sentences with something completely different like structures are “spelled-out” using words or mor-
“You are reading”. Thus, we can effectively break down phemes with phonological content. This can also be
the forms in parts and distinguishing the different mor- thought of as lexical insertion into the syntactics.
phemes. Similarly, keep in mind that the meaning and
the form are equally important during the identification
of morphemes. For instance, agent and comparative mor- 5 See also
phemes illustrate this point. An agent morpheme is an af-
 3

5.1 Linguistics
• Alternation (linguistics)
• Hybrid word

• Morphological parsing
• Theoretical linguistics

• Word stem
• Phoneme

• Bound morpheme

5.2 Lexicology
• Floating tone

• Greek morphemes
• Morphophonology

6 References
[1] Kemmer, Suzanne. “Words in English: Structure”. Re-
trieved 10 April 2014.

[2] Packer, Martin. “Morphology” (PDF). Retrieved 20

March 2014.

[3] Morphology Classification Of Morphemes Referenced 19

March 2014

[4] “Morphology II”. Retrieved 10 April 2014.

[5] Department of Linguistics (2011). Language files: Mate-

rials for an introduction to language and linguistics (11th
ed.). Ohio State University Press.

• Spencer, Andrew (1992). Morphological Theory.

Oxford: Blackwell.

7 External links
• Glossary of reading terms
• Comprehensive and searchable morpheme reference

• Linguistics 001 — Lecture 7 — Morphology by

Prof. Mark Lieberman

• Pronunciation of the word morpheme

4 8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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