"A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression."
The smallest units of meaning in language, including root words, prefixes, and suffixes.
Definition of Morphemes: Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in language.
Types of Morphemes: There are two types of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes.
Free Morphemes: Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone as words.
Bound Morphemes: Bound morphemes are morphemes that must be attached to other morphemes to form words.
Inflectional Morphemes: Inflectional morphemes are bound morphemes that do not change the meaning of the word, but rather indicate tense, number, or gender.
Derivational Morphemes: Derivational morphemes are bound morphemes that change the meaning of the word.
Allomorphs: Allomorphs are different phonetic forms of the same morpheme.
Morpheme Structure: Morphemes can have different structures, including prefixes, suffixes, and infixes.
Productivity: Productivity refers to how easily new words can be created using morphemes.
Overgeneralization: Children may overgeneralize the rules of morphemes when learning a language, resulting in errors.
Morphological Analysis: Morphological analysis is the process of breaking down a word into its constituent morphemes.
Morphological Trees: Morphological trees are visual representations of the structure of words and their constituent morphemes.
Morphological Processes: Morphological processes include affixation, compounding, reduplication, and suppletion.
Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology: Inflectional morphology deals with the way words change grammatically, while derivational morphology deals with the way new words are formed.
Morphophonemics: Morphophonemics is the study of how morphemes change their pronunciation depending on their context.
Word Formation: Word formation is the process of creating new words from existing morphemes.
Lexical Semantics: Lexical semantics deals with the meaning of words, including how morphemes contribute to that meaning.
Prosodic Morphology: Prosodic morphology is the study of how morphemes are pronounced in different contexts.
Free morphemes: These are standalone words that can function independently as a word, such as "cat", "dog", "book", etc.
Bound morphemes: These are morphemes that cannot function independently as a word and must be attached to another morpheme, such as the suffix "-ing" in "running", or the prefix "un-" in "unhappy".
Root morphemes: These are the basic, irreducible units of meaning in a word, and they can stand alone as a word or be combined with other morphemes to form more complex words. For example, "gard" in "gardener" is a root morpheme that means "to tend or cultivate".
Affixes: These are morphemes that are added to the beginning (prefixes) or end (suffixes) of a word to change its meaning or grammatical function. For example, the suffix "-ment" in "enjoyment" changes the verb "enjoy" into a noun.
Inflectional morphemes: These are suffixes that are added to a word to indicate tense, number, case, or gender, but do not change the basic meaning of the word. For example, the plural "-s" at the end of "cats" is an inflectional morpheme that indicates there is more than one cat.
Derivational morphemes: These are affixes that change the basic meaning of a word, create a new word from an existing one, or change the part of speech of a word. For example, the suffix "-ly" in "quickly" changes the adjective "quick" into an adverb.
Compounding: This is a process of combining two or more words together to create a new word with its own meaning. For example, "toothbrush" is a compound word made up of the words "tooth" and "brush".
Reduplication: This is a process of repeating a portion of a word to create a new word with a slightly different meaning. For example, "flip-flop" is a reduplicated word that refers to a type of sandal.
Clitics: These are morphemes that are attached to a word but have a weaker syntactic connection to it than a normal inflectional or derivational morpheme. They are typically unstressed and cannot stand alone as a separate word. For example, the suffix "-'s" in "John's book" is a clitic that indicates possession.
Suppletion: This is the phenomenon in which an irregular form of a word replaces its regular counterpart in some forms or contexts. For example, "go" is irregular in the past tense form "went", which supplants the regular "-ed" suffix used for most verbs.
"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."
"Other morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes."
"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."
""Unbreakable" is composed of three morphemes: un-, break, and -able."
"un- (a bound morpheme signifying "not")"
"break (the root, a free morpheme)"
"-able (a bound morpheme signifying "an ability to be done")"
"The plural morpheme for regular nouns (-s) has three allomorphs."
"it is pronounced /s/ (e.g., in cats)"
"it is pronounced /ɪz, əz/ (e.g., in dishes)"
"it is pronounced /z/ (e.g., in dogs)"
"depending on the pronunciation of the root"
"the concept of plurality"
"an ability to be done"
"a bound morpheme"
"For a language like Latin, a root can be defined as the main lexical morpheme of a word."