Morphemes

From Psychology Wiki

Community portal · Tasks to do · News · Help

Clinical · Educational · Ind&Org · Other fields · Professional · Transpersonal · World

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language
Personality | Philosophy | Research Methods | Social | Statistics

Language: Linguistics · Semiotics · Speech

---

In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation.

Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members.

English example: The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes "un-", (negatory) a bound morpheme, "-break-" a free morpheme, and "-able". "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.

Contents 1 Types of morphemes 1.1 Other variants 2 See also 3 References & Bibliography 4 Key texts 4.1 Books 4.2 Papers 5 Additional material 5.1 Books 5.2 Papers 6 External links

[edit] Types of morphemes

• Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, or "free". Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as /-z/, /-s/ or /- ɪz/.
• Bound morphemes 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.
• 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).
• Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."

[edit] Other variants

• Null morpheme
• Root morpheme
• Prefix morpheme
• Suffix morpheme

[edit] See also

• Morphology (language)
• Morphophonology
• Chereme
• Grapheme
• Phoneme
• Phonetics
• Sememe
• Floating tone
• Theoretical linguistics

[edit] References & Bibliography

[edit] Key texts

[edit] Books

• Spencer, Andrew (1992). Morphological Theory, Oxford: Blackwell.

[edit] Papers

[edit] Additional material

[edit] Books

[edit] Papers

[edit] External links

• University of Oregon Linguistics Course: The Structure of English Words (LING150)
• Morpheme Study Aid
• Morphemes--A New Threat to Society: A humorous look at morphemes. Accurate, but purposely confuses morphemes with narcotics (i.e., "morphine").

This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Morpheme. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.