Morphemes

Definition of “morpheme”

We have seen that a single word in Zapotec can be composed of several meaningful elements, or morphemes. Of course, the same is true in English (13) and a large number of other languages.

(12) kañeebe        ka-ñee-be           ‘hisfeet’

        kaʒigitu          ka-ʒigi-tu            ‘your(pl)chins’

        kaʒikeluʔ       ka-ʒike-luʔ          ‘yourshoulders’

(13) chairman                chair-man

        distrust                   dis-trust

        unbelievable          un-believ(e)-able

        unsparingly            un-spar(e)-ing-ly

        palatalization         palat(e)-al-iz(e)-ation

What do we mean when we say that a certain form, such as Zapotec ka–, is a “morpheme?” Charles Hockett (1958) gave a definition of this term which is often quoted:

Morphemes are the smallest individually meaningful elements in the utterances of a language.

There are two crucial aspects of this definition. First, a morpheme is meaningful. A morpheme normally involves a consistent association of phonological form with some aspect of meaning, as seen in (7) where the form ñee was consistently associated with the concept ‘foot. ’However, this association of form with meaning can be somewhat flexible. We will see various ways in which the phonological shape of a morpheme may be altered to some extent in particular environments, and there are some morphemes whose meaning may depend partly on context.

Second, morphemes are the smallest meaningful elements. “Smallest” here does not refer to physical duration (time of articulation) or phonological weight. A morpheme may consist of a single phoneme (like the /a-/ in a-moral, a-temporal, a-theism) or long strings of phonemes (such as elephant, spatula, Mississippi, etc.) The real point is that a single morpheme may not contain any smaller element (or SUBSTRING) which is itself a meaningful element. For example, the word unhappy is not a single morpheme because it contains two substrings which are each “individually meaningful”: un–means ‘not’ and happy means ‘happy’. Thus, rather than saying that a morpheme is the smallest meaningful element, we might say that a morpheme is the MINIMAL meaningful element, in the sense that it cannot be subdivided in to smaller meaningful elements.

The words catalogue, catastrophe, and caterpillar are all single morphemes in modern English. Even though they all contain the sequence cat (/kæt–/), they do not contain the English morpheme cat, because their meaning has nothing to do with cats. For the same reason, the word caterpillar does not contain the morpheme pillar. Are current element of form does not automatically indicate the presence of a common morpheme, unless the recurring phonological material correlates with some common element of meaning.

A final point should be made in relation to the definition stated above. Hockett identified the morpheme as the smallest “individually meaningful element” in the language. This phrase helps us to understand the difference between morphemes and phonemes. The contrast between two sounds (i.e. phonemes) is said to be SIGNIFICANT when substituting one for the other changes the meaning of a word, as in bill vs. pill, lake vs. rake, mad vs. mat, or the contrastive set beat, bit, bait, bet, bat. But even though such examples show that the contrast between /b/ and /p/ etc. is significant, the phoneme /b/ has no inherent meaning of its own. It is not “individually meaningful.” So, while the phoneme is “smaller” than the morpheme, in the sense that a single morpheme often consists of many phonemes, the morpheme is “meaningful” in a way that individual phonemes are not. We will mention (in a very preliminary way) different types of meaning that a morpheme may carry.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

دار الكفيل تنهي طباعة كتاب (لمَ لا) تمهيدًا لمناقشته في ملتقى غيث السماء القرآني الثاني

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تطلق مسابقتها الثقافية بذكرى ولادة الإمام زين العابدين (عليه السلام)

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تكرّم 1000 طالبة من المرتديات العباءة العراقية في مدارس الديوانية

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تؤكد أهمية الحجاب كجزء من منظومة الواجبات الشرعية

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

الخبز الأسمر أم الأبيض.. أيهما أفضل لضبط سكر الدم؟

عقاقير التخسيس و"الانتحار".. الحكومة الأميركية تحسم الجدل

الهرم الغذائي الجديد.. لماذا يعد "انقلابا" في خارطة الطعام؟

لحماية ظهرك وقلبك في آن واحد.. ما وضعية النوم الصحيحة؟

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

كيف يعزز الضوء الطبيعي تفكيرك وانتباهك خلال اليوم

سابقة.. طاقم من محطة الفضاء الدولية يعود إلى الأرض مبكرا

منصات التواصل تضرّ بنفسية المراهقين… والفتيات الأكثر تأثرا

ابتكار ألماني قد يغيّر مستقبل صناعة البلاستيك

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Morphological aspect

Constituent structure

A typology of word structure

Analyzing position classes

Representing word structure

Different kinds of morphemes

Analyzing word structure

Mirror in nominal morphology

Appendix 2: Hapax legomena from the Cobuild corpus

Appendix 1: 20th century neologisms from the OED

Morphological Productivity Structural Constraints in English Derivation Conclusion

Verbal derivation and the separation hypothesis