Morpheme

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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.

Contents

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:

Classification

Free and bound morphemes

Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound: [6]

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

  • Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change the semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, 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

  • Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb or the number, grammatical gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. An inflectional morpheme changes the form of a word. English has eight inflections. [7] [8]

Allomorphs

Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in form but are semantically similar. For example, the English plural marker has 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 an allophone and a phoneme.

Zero-bound-morpheme

Zero-morpheme

A zero-morpheme is a type of morpheme that carries semantic meaning but is not represented by auditory phoneme. 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 /∅/ within glosses. [9]

Generally, such morphemes have no visible changes. For instance, sheep is both the singular and the plural form of that noun; rather than taking the usual plural suffix -s to form hypothetical *sheeps, the plural is analyzed as being composed of sheep + -∅, the null plural suffix. The intended meaning is thus derived from the co-occurrence determiner (in this case, "some-" or "a-"). [10]

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 noun cats in English consists of the root cat and the plural suffix -s, and so the singular cat may be analyzed as the root inflected with the null singular suffix -∅. [11]

Content vs. function

Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or content, and function morphemes have more of a grammatical role. For example, the morphemes fast and sad can be considered content morphemes. On the other hand, the suffix -ed is a function morpheme since it has the grammatical function of indicating past 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. [12] Examples of ambiguous situations are the preposition over and the determiner your, which seem to have concrete meanings but are considered function morphemes since their role is to connect ideas grammatically. [13] Here is a general rule to determine the category of a morpheme:

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 word quirkiness, the root is quirk, but the stem is quirky, which has two morphemes.

Moreover, some pairs of affixes have identical phonological form but different meanings. For example, the suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g. sell ⇒ seller) or inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). Such morphemes are called homophonous. [13]

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 word Madagascar is long and might seem to have morphemes like mad, gas, and car, but it does not. Conversely, some short words have multiple morphemes (e.g. dogs = dog + s). [13]

Morphological icons

Morphological icons are images, patterns or symbols that relate to a specific morpheme. [14] For children with dyslexia, it has been shown to be an effective way of building up a word.[ citation needed ] The word 'inviting' as an example contains two commonly used morphemes, 'in-' and '-ing'. A morphological icon for 'in-' could be an arrow going into a cup, and '-ing' could be an arrow going forward to symbolise that something is in action (as in being, running, fishing).

The concept of combining visual aid icons with morpheme teaching methods was pioneered from the mid-1980s by Neville Brown. [15] He founded the Maple Hayes school for dyslexia in 1981, where he later improved the method alongside his son, Daryl Brown. The school's curriculum uses morphological icons as a learning aid. [16]

Morphological analysis

In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese, and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of morphemes. Morphological analysis is closely related to part-of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for those languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces. [17]

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 -er that 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. [13]

Changing definitions

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

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 example idiom is "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:

See also

Related Research Articles

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 affixes. The first ones, such as -un, -ation, anti-, pre- etc, introduce a semantic change to the word they are attached to. The latter ones introduce a syntactic change, such as singular into plural, or present simple tense into present continuous or past tense by adding -ing, -ed to an English word. All of them are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes.

In linguistics, declension is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and articles to indicate number, case, gender, and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.

A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.

A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single root word. For example, in English, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as RUN.

In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning. Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect. Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over the history of a language.

An analytic language is a type of natural language concept of which a series of root/stem words are accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers, using affixes very rarely, as opposed to synthetic languages which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly. Syntactic roles are assigned to words primarily by the word order. For example, by changing the individual words in the Latin phrase fēl-is pisc-em cēpit "the cat caught the fish" to fēl-em pisc-is cēpit "the fish caught the cat", the fish becomes the subject, while the cat becomes the object. This transformation is not possible in an analytic language without altering the word order. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. No natural language, however, is purely analytic or purely synthetic.

Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness. For example, unhappy and happiness derive from the root word happy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agglutination</span> Process of word formation by combining morphemes of singular meaning

In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. For example, in the agglutinative language of Turkish, the word evlerinizden consists of the morphemes ev-ler-i-n-i-z-de-n. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted with isolating languages, in which words are monomorphemic, and fusional languages, in which words can be complex, but morphemes may correspond to multiple features.

A root is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family, which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes. However, sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word without its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems. A root, or a root morpheme, in the stricter sense, may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem.

A synthetic language is a language that is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. Rule-wise, a synthetic language is characterized by denoting syntactic relationship between the words via inflection and agglutination, dividing them into fusional or agglutinating subtypes of word synthesis. Further divisions include polysynthetic languages and oligosynthetic languages. In contrast, rule-wise, the analytic languages rely more on auxiliary verbs and word order to denote syntactic relationship between the words.

In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme that can appear only as part of a larger expression, while a free morpheme is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, and a free morpheme is a type of free form.

In generative linguistics, Distributed Morphology is a theoretical framework introduced in 1993 by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz. The central claim of Distributed Morphology is that there is no divide between the construction of words and sentences. The syntax is the single generative engine that forms sound-meaning correspondences, both complex phrases and complex words. This approach challenges the traditional notion of the Lexicon as the unit where derived words are formed and idiosyncratic word-meaning correspondences are stored. In Distributed Morphology there is no unified Lexicon as in earlier generative treatments of word-formation. Rather, the functions that other theories ascribe to the Lexicon are distributed among other components of the grammar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tzeltal language</span> Mayan language of Mexico

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Word</span> Basic element of language

A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.

In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns. Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories and case features.

In linguistics, apophony is any alternation within a word that indicates grammatical information.

Tübatulabal is an Uto-Aztecan language, traditionally spoken in Kern County, California, United States. It is the traditional language of the Tübatulabal, who still speak the traditional language in addition to English. The language originally had three main dialects: Bakalanchi, Pakanapul and Palegawan.

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry grammatical information or lexical information . Inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. Derivational suffixes fall into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inflection</span> Process of word formation

In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc, as declension.

References

  1. ↑ Haspelmath, Martin (2010). Understanding Morphology. Andrea D. Sims (2nd ed.). London: Hodder Education. p. 14. ISBN   978-0-340-95001-2. OCLC   671004133.
  2. ↑ Kemmer, Suzanne. "Structure". Words in English. Retrieved 10 April 2014.
  3. ↑ "Word Grabber For Morpheme - Vocabulary List". Vocabulary.com.
  4. ↑ 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.
  5. ↑ "LINGUIST List Home Page".[ dead link ]
  6. ↑ De Kuthy, Kordula (October 22, 2001). "Morphology" (PDF). Linguistics 201: Introduction to Language in the Humanities. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-03-20. Retrieved 19 March 2014.
  7. ↑ "Module 1 Concepts: Inflectional Morpheme". ENG 411B. Archived from the original on 2013-02-18.
  8. ↑ Matthew, Baerman (2015). The Morpheme. Oxford University Press: Oxford University Press. p. 8. ISBN   9780199591428 . Retrieved 30 September 2019.
  9. ↑ Gerner, Matthias; Ling, Zhang (2020-05-06). "Zero morphemes in paradigms". Studies in Language. International Journal Sponsored by the Foundation "Foundations of Language". 44 (1): 1–26. doi:10.1075/sl.16085.ger. ISSN   0378-4177. S2CID   218935697.
  10. ↑ Dahl, Eystein Dahl; Fábregas, Antonio (2018). "Zero Morphemes". Linguistics. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.592. ISBN   978-0-19-938465-5 . Retrieved 3 November 2019.
  11. ↑ "Null morpheme – Glottopedia". glottopedia.org. Retrieved 2022-06-15.
  12. ↑ "Morphology II" . Retrieved 10 April 2014.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Department of Linguistics (2011). Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics (11th ed.). Ohio State University Press.
  14. ↑ Richard Garner (July 27, 2014). "College for dyslexic pupils uses flashcard system to teach literacy". The Independent .
  15. ↑ Justine Halifax (January 4, 2015). "Dyslexia dictionary: Lichfield doctor father and son lead way in helping young sufferers". Birmingham Mail .
  16. ↑ Ross Hawkes (May 14, 2019). "Author's tribute to experts behind Lichfield dyslexia school". Lichfield Live .
  17. ↑ Nakagawa, Tetsuji (2004). "Chinese and Japanese word segmentation using word-level and character-level information". Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics - COLING '04. Geneva, Switzerland: Association for Computational Linguistics: 466–es. doi: 10.3115/1220355.1220422 . S2CID   2988891.
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