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Concept
Morpheme
Summary
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. 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 (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.
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:
"Unbreakable" is composed of three morphemes: un- (a bound morpheme signifying "not"), break (the root, a free morpheme), and -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 kæts), /ɪz, əz/ (e.g., in dishes dɪʃᵻz), and /z/ (e.g., in dogs dɒɡz), depending on the pronunciation of the root.
Bound and free morphemes
Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound:
Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only when accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, specifically prefixes and suffixes. Examples of suffixes are -tion, -sion, -tive, -ation, -ible, and -ing. Bound morphemes that are not affixed are called cranberry morphemes.
Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional morphemes.
Official source
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