Words and Morphemes :: essays research papers

Words and MorphemesThe MorphemeIn order to describe the form of the linguistic expressions (phrases, sentences, texts) in a language, we must describe how those complex expressions are built from smaller parts, until ultimately we which the atoms of linguistic form. The term morpheme is used to refer to an atom of linguistic form.Most languages have a intelligence like the English word word, that appears at first to refer to precisely the sorts of minimal linguistic objects we have in mind. But there are two reasons to reject word as the guess for the minimal unit of linguistic form The term word is ambiguous, referring to at least three different sorts of object. In many languages, linguistic expressions we would want to identify as wrangling are in fact structurally complex.We consider the second of these points here the first is taken up below.The following are all speech of English cat cats cat+s catty cat+y help helped help+ed unhelpful un+help+ful bake bakery bak+ery bak er bak+er dedicate dedication dedicat+ion rededicate re+dedicate rededicationings re+dedicat+ion+ing+s establish establishment establish+ment antidisestablishmentarianism anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism The words in the centre towboat can be broken down into parts, as indicated in the right-hand column. It is not obvious that those in the left-hand column can be factored in the same way.A monomorphemic word like help is structurally complex in one sense it can be decomposed into distinct phonological elements (sounds, if you will), each associated with some configuration of the speech organs. The same is true of helped of course, but that is not what leads up to segment helped into two morphemes help+ed (/help+t/). The intuition that leads us to divide helped into two parts is that each part is associated with a message. Thus, the usual definition of morpheme is something like the following A morpheme is the minimal unit of linguistic expression that is associated with a meanin g.The term duality of patterning was current in the 1960s to refer to this design feature of human language that phonological objects without meaning combine to form meaningful atoms, which themselves combine to form complex linguistic expressions.Types of MorphemesThe standard typology of morphemes classifies them according to their freedom of legislaterence free boundmorphological billet root stem affixmode of attachment prefix suffix infix circumfix reduplicationFree and Bound MorphemesFree morphemes are those that can occur alone, as monomorphemic words bound morphemes always occur in combination with some other morpheme It is often the case, in a morphologically-complex word, that none of the fragment morphemes are free, as in