Morphemes Definition of “morpheme”
المؤلف:
PAUL R. KROEGER
المصدر:
Analyzing Grammar An Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
P12-C2
2025-12-03
14
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.
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