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In morpheme-based morphology
Morpheme-based morphology

Morpheme-based morphology is a view on morphology with the following three basic axioms:# Baudoin?s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the same status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES....
, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic
Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
 meaning
Meaning (linguistics)

Linguistic strings can be made up of phenomena such as words, phrases, and sentences, each of which has a different kind of meaning. Individual words, such as the word "bachelor", refer to some abstract concept....
. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phoneme
Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
s (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of grapheme
Grapheme

In typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in writing systems. Graphemes include letter , Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems....
s (the smallest units of written language).

The concept morpheme differs from the concept word
Word

A word is a unit of language that represents a concept which can be expressively communication with Meaning . A word consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value....
, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own.






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In morpheme-based morphology
Morpheme-based morphology

Morpheme-based morphology is a view on morphology with the following three basic axioms:# Baudoin?s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the same status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES....
, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic
Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
 meaning
Meaning (linguistics)

Linguistic strings can be made up of phenomena such as words, phrases, and sentences, each of which has a different kind of meaning. Individual words, such as the word "bachelor", refer to some abstract concept....
. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phoneme
Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
s (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of grapheme
Grapheme

In typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in writing systems. Graphemes include letter , Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems....
s (the smallest units of written language).

The concept morpheme differs from the concept word
Word

A word is a unit of language that represents a concept which can be expressively communication with Meaning . A word consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value....
, 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 different morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.

English example: The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-", a bound morpheme; "break", a free morpheme; and "-able", a bound morpheme. "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both "un-" and "-able" are affix
Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivation , like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed....
es.

The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", , in cats , but "-es", , in dishes , and even the voiced "-s", , in dogs . "-s". These are allomorphs.

Types of morphemes


  • Free morphemes like town, and dog can appear with other lexeme
    Lexeme

    A lexeme is an abstract Unit of Morphology Semantic analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word....
    s (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, i.e. "free".
  • Bound morpheme
    Bound morpheme

    In morphology , a bound morpheme is a morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word while carrying the lexical meaning related to the one in the word it is taken from....
    s like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme
    Lexeme

    A lexeme is an abstract Unit of Morphology Semantic analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word....
    . 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
    Cranberry morpheme

    In morphology , a cranberry morpheme is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned a meaning or a grammatical function but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other....
    , from the "cran" in that very word.
  • Derivational
    Derivation (linguistics)

    In linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words, as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine....
     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
    Semantics

    Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
     information.
  • Inflection
    Inflection

    In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical case....
    al morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on, without deriving a new word or a word in a new grammatical category (as in the "dog" morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme "-s" becomes "dogs"). They carry grammatical
    Grammatical category

    A grammatical category or functional category is a linguistic term encompassing, among other things:*Animacy*Countability *Definiteness ...
     information.
  • Allomorphs
    Allomorph

    An allomorph is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme. The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound without changing meaning....
     are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as , or .


Other variants

  • Null morpheme
    Null morpheme

    In Morphology #Morpheme-based_morphology, a null morpheme is a morpheme that is realized by a phonology null affix . In simpler terms, a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix....
  • Root morpheme
  • Word stem
    Word stem

    In linguistics, a stem is the part of a word that is common to all its inflection variants. Stems are often root , e.g. atomic, its root is atom, but its stem is atom?ic....


Morphological analysis

In natural language processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
 for Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
, Chinese
Chinese language

Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of language mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan languages of languages....
 and other languages, morphological analysis is a process of segmenting given sentence into a row of morphemes. It is closely related to Part-of-speech tagging
Part-of-speech tagging

Part-of-speech tagging , also called grammatical tagging or word-category disambiguation, is the process of marking up the words in a text as corresponding to a particular parts of speech, based on both its definition, as well as its context?i.e., relationship with adjacent and related words in a phrase, sentence, or paragraph....
, but word segmentation is required for these languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces. Famous Japanese morphological analysers include , ChaSen
ChaSen

ChaSen is a morphological parser for the Japanese language. This tool for analyzing morphemes was developed at the Matsumoto laboratory, Nara Institute of Science and Technology....
 and .

See also

  • International Phonetic Alphabet
    International Phonetic Alphabet

    The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
  • Hybrid word
    Hybrid word

    A hybrid word is a Word which etymology has one part derived from one language and another part derived from a different language....
  • Alternation (linguistics)
    Alternation (linguistics)

    In linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a phoneme or morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonology realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternant....
  • Lexeme
    Lexeme

    A lexeme is an abstract Unit of Morphology Semantic analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word....
  • Morphophonology
    Morphophonology

    Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics which studies:*The phonology structure of morpheme.*The combinatory phonic modifications of morphemes which happen when they are combined...
  • Chereme
    Chereme

    The chereme , is a term for the basic unit of sign language communication. It is functionally equivalent to the phonemes of oral languages, and has been replaced by that term in the academic literature....
  • Grapheme
    Grapheme

    In typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in writing systems. Graphemes include letter , Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems....
  • Phoneme
    Phoneme

    In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
  • Sememe
    Sememe

    Sememe - semantical language unit of meaning, correlative to morpheme.A sememe is a proposed unit of transmitted or intended meaning; it is atomic or indivisible....
  • Floating tone
    Floating tone

    A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains no consonants, no vowels, but only tone . It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes....
  • Theoretical linguistics
    Theoretical linguistics

    Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology , and semantics....
  • Marker (linguistics)
    Marker (linguistics)

    In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word or sentence. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished....
  • Morphological parsing
    Morphological parsing

    The goal of morphological parsing is to find out what morphemes a given word is built from. It should be able to distinguish between orthographic rules and morphological rules....


External links


  • by Prof. Mark Lieberman
  • : A humorous look at morphemes. Accurate, but purposely confuses morphemes with narcotics (i.e., "morphine
    Morphine

    Morphine is a highly potent opiate analgesic Medication, is the principal active agent in opium, and is considered to be the prototypical opioid....
    ").