AskDefine | Define morpheme

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Define morphallaxis Define morphemic Go to Dictionary Definition Go to User Contributed Dictionary Go to Extensive Definition Go to Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words

Dictionary Definition
morpheme n : minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units

User Contributed Dictionary

English
Pronunciation
/m(r)fim/ /'mO:(r)fi:m/

Noun
1. : The smallest linguistic unit that can carry a meaning. The word pigs consists of two morphemes: pig (a particular animal) and s (indication of the plural). Derived terms morphemic Translations smallest linguistic unit

Bosnian: morfema Bulgarian: Chinese: , (cs) Croatian: morfem Czech: morfm Dutch: morfeem Esperanto: morfemo Finnish: morfeemi French: morphme German: Morphem

Greek: (mrphma) Hungarian: morfma Icelandic: myndan , morfem , minnsta merkingarbr eining mls Japanese: (, keitaiso) Korean: (hyeong-taeso) Latin: morphema Persian: (takvzh) Polish: morfem Portuguese: morfema Russian: Serbian: Cyrillic: Roman: morfema

Spanish: morfema Swedish: morfem Ukrainian: Welsh: morffem chereme chroneme grapheme lexeme listeme phoneme toneme

See also

Extensive Definition
In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest units of written language). The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs. The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-" (meaning not x), a bound morpheme; "-break-", a free morpheme; and "-able", a bound morpheme. "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes. The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", , in cats ([kts]), but "-es", [z], in dishes ([dz]), and even the voiced "-s", [z], in dogs ([dgz]). These are the allomorphs of "-s". It might even change entirely into -ren in children.

Types of morphemes

Free morphemes like town, and dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, i.e. "free". Bound morphemes (or affixes) 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. Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness." They carry semantic information. 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"). They carry grammatical information. Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as [-z], [-s] or [-z]. Null morpheme Root morpheme Word stem

Other variants

Morphological analysis
In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a given sentence into a row of morphemes. It is closely related to Part-of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for these languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces. Famous Japanese morphological analysers include Juman, ChaSen and Mecab.

See also

International Phonetic Alphabet Hybrid word Alternation (linguistics) Lexeme Morphophonology Chereme Grapheme Phoneme Sememe Floating tone Theoretical linguistics Marker (linguistics) Morphological parsing Morphological Theory

References

External links

Glossary of Reading Terms Comprehensive and searchable morpheme reference Linguistics 001 Lecture 7 Morphology by Prof. Mark Lieberman Morphemes A New Threat to Society: A humorous look at morphemes. Accurate, but purposely confuses morphemes with narcotics (i.e., "morphine"). Morpheme Study Aid

morpheme in Breton: Morfem morpheme in Bulgarian: morpheme in Catalan: Morfema morpheme in Czech: Morfm morpheme in Welsh: Morffem morpheme in Danish: Morfem morpheme in German: Morphem morpheme in Estonian: Morfeem morpheme in Spanish: Morfema morpheme in Esperanto: Morfemo morpheme in Persian: morpheme in French: Morphme morpheme in Irish: Moirfim morpheme in Galician: Morfema morpheme in Korean: morpheme in Upper Sorbian: Morfem morpheme in Croatian: Morfem morpheme in Ido: Morfemo morpheme in Icelandic: Myndan morpheme in Italian: Morfema morpheme in Hebrew: morpheme in Kurdish: Morfm morpheme in Hungarian: Morfma morpheme in Dutch: Morfeem morpheme in Japanese: morpheme in Norwegian: Morfem morpheme in Norwegian Nynorsk: Morfem morpheme in Novial: Morfeme morpheme in Low German: Morphem morpheme in Polish: Morfem morpheme in Portuguese: Morfema morpheme in Romanian: Morfem morpheme in Quechua: Rimana yapaq morpheme in Russian: morpheme in Slovak: Morfma morpheme in Finnish: Morfeemi morpheme in Swedish: Morfem morpheme in Turkish: Biimbirim morpheme in Ukrainian: morpheme in Venetian: Morfema morpheme in Walloon: Morfinme morpheme in Chinese:

Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words

IC analysis, accidence, affix, affixation, allomorph, bound morpheme, conjugation, cutting, declension, derivation, difference of form, enclitic, form, formative, free form, glosseme, icon, immediate constituent analysis, infix, infixation, inflection, lexeme, lexical form, morph, morphemic analysis, morphemics, morphology, morphophonemics, paradigm, phrase, prefix, prefixation, proclitic, radical, root, semasiological unit, sememe, sign, signifiant, significant, stem, suffix, suffixation, symbol, term, theme, token, type, word, word-formation Privacy Policy, About Us, Terms and Conditions, Contact Us Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 Material from Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Dict Valid HTML 4.01 Strict, Valid CSS Level 2.1