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Linguistics is the study of language, and there is a lot to unpack about language, so why not start small? Words are the smallest unit of meaning in a language, right? Guess again! Small segments of sound that carry meaning—many even smaller than words—are called morphemes. There are many types of morphemes that can come together to make a single word.
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Jetzt kostenlos anmeldenLinguistics is the study of language, and there is a lot to unpack about language, so why not start small? Words are the smallest unit of meaning in a language, right? Guess again! Small segments of sound that carry meaning—many even smaller than words—are called morphemes. There are many types of morphemes that can come together to make a single word.
Morphology is the study of these sub-word sounds and how they function to create meaning in language.
Consider the word smallest from the paragraph above. This word can be broken down into two segments that carry significance: small and -est. While -est isn’t a word in and of itself, it does carry significance that any English-speaking person should recognize; it essentially means “the most.”
A division of linguistics, morphology is the study of the smallest segments of language that carry meaning.
Language includes everything from grammar to sentence structure, and the segments of language that we use to express meaning are most often words. Morphology deals with words and their makeup. But what are words made of?
There is an even smaller unit of language than morphemes—phonemes. Phonemes are the distinct components of sound that come together to build a morpheme or word. The difference between morphemes and phonemes is that morphemes carry significance or meaning in and of themselves, whereas phonemes do not. For example, the words dog and dig are separated by a single phoneme—the middle vowel—but neither /ɪ/ (as in dig) nor /ɒ/ (as in dog) carries meaning by itself.
In the example of the word smallest, the two segments small and -est come together to make a complete word. These building blocks are an example of individual morphemes.
Morphemes are the smallest units of language that have meaning and can’t be further subdivided.
When we put together the morphemes small (which is a word by itself) and -est (which is not a word but does mean something when added to a word) we get a new word that means something different from the word small.
Small – something slight in size.
Smallest – the most slight in size.
But what if we wanted to make a different word? There are other morphemes we can add to the root word small to make different combinations and, therefore, different words.
There are two major types of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes. The smallest example is made up of one of each of these types of morphemes.
Small – is a free morpheme
-est – is a bound morpheme
A free morpheme is a morpheme that occurs alone and carries meaning as a word. Free morphemes are also called unbound or freestanding morphemes. You might also call a free morpheme a root word, which is the irreducible core of a single word.
Frigid
Are
Must
Tall
Picture
Roof
Clear
Mountain
These examples are all free morphemes because they cannot be subdivided into smaller pieces that hold significance. Free morphemes can be any type of word—whether an adjective, a noun, or anything else—they simply have to stand alone as a unit of language that conveys meaning.
You might be tempted to say that free morphemes are simply all words and leave it at that. This is true, but free morphemes are actually categorized as either lexical or functional according to how they function.
Lexical morphemes carry the content or meaning of a message.
Stand
Stage
Compact
Deliver
Meet
Blanket
Tree
Excess
You might think of them as the substance of language. To identify a lexical morpheme, ask yourself, “If I deleted this morpheme from the sentence, would it lose its meaning?” If this answer is yes, then you almost certainly have a lexical morpheme.
As opposed to lexical morphemes, functional morphemes do not carry the content of a message. These are the words in a sentence that are more functional, meaning that they coordinate the meaningful words.
With
There
And
So
You
But
If
We
Remember that functional morphemes are still free morphemes, which means they can stand alone as a word with meaning. You wouldn’t categorize a morpheme such as re- or -un as a grammatical morpheme because they aren’t words that stand alone with meaning.
Unlike lexical morphemes, bound morphemes are those that cannot stand alone with meaning. Bound morphemes must occur with other morphemes to create a complete word.
Many bound morphemes are affixes.
An affix is an additional segment added to a root word to change its meaning. An affix may be added to the beginning (prefix) or the end (suffix) of a word.
Not all bound morphemes are affixes, but they are certainly the most common form. Here are a few examples of affixes you might see:
-est
-ly
-ed
-s
un-
re-
im-
a-
Bound morphemes can do one of two things: they can change the grammatical category of the root word (derivational morpheme), or they can simply alter its form (inflectional morpheme).
When a morpheme changes the way you’d categorize the root word grammatically, it’s a derivational morpheme.
Poor (adjective) + ly (derivational morpheme) = poorly (adverb)
The root word poor is an adjective, but when you add the suffix -ly—which is a derivational morpheme—it changes to an adverb. Other examples of derivational morphemes include -ness, non-, and -ful.
When a bound morpheme is attached to a word but does not change the root word's grammatical category, it is an inflectional morpheme. These morphemes simply modify the root word in some way.
Fireplace + s = fireplaces
Adding the -s to the end of the word fireplace did not change the word in any significant way—it simply modified it to reflect multiple rather than one single fireplace.
Sometimes it’s easier to see a visual representation of something than to explain it. Morphological trees do exactly that.
Unreachable – the inability to be reached or contacted
Un (inflectional morpheme) reach (lexical morpheme) able (free morpheme)
This example shows how the word unreachable can be broken into individual morphemes.
The morpheme able is an affix that changes the word reach (a verb) to reachable (an adjective.) This makes it a derivational morpheme.
After you add the affix un- you get the word unreachable which is the same grammatical category (adjective) as reachable, and so this is an inflectional morpheme.
Motivation – the reason or reasons why someone does something
Motiv (lexical morpheme) ate (derivational morpheme) ion (derivational morpheme)
The root word is motive (a noun) which, with the addition of the affix -ate becomes motivate (a verb). The addition of the bound morpheme -ion changes the verb motivate to the noun motivation.
Linguistics, the scientific study of language, is made up of several specific domains related to language. Starting from the smallest, most basic unit of language (phonetics) and graduating up to the study of discourse and contextual meaning (pragmatics), linguistics consists of the following sections:
Phonetics
Phonology
Morphology
Semantics
Pragmatics
Morphology and syntax are close to one another in terms of the linguistic domain. While morphology studies the smallest units of meaning in language, syntax deals with how words are linked together to create meaning.
The difference between syntax and morphology is essentially the difference between studying how words are formed (morphology) and how sentences are formed (syntax).
Semantics is one level removed from morphology in the grand scheme of linguistic study. Semantics is the branch of linguistics responsible for understanding meaning in general. To understand the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text, you might rely on semantics.
Morphology also deals with meaning to a degree, but only in as much as the smaller sub-word units of language can carry meaning. To examine the meaning of anything larger than a morpheme would fall under the domain of semantics.
Morphology is the study of the smallest units of language that carry meaning. Morphology helps to better understand complex words with many components such as unreliability, and the ways each morpheme function.
A morpheme is the smallest segment of language that contains meaning. An example is “un” as it is not a word, but it does mean “not” when added as a prefix to a root word.
Some close synonyms (although not exact) for morphology are etymology and sound structure.
Morphology is the study of morphemes, which are the smallest significant building blocks of language.
It is the study of the structure of words.
What is morphology?
A division of linguistics, morphology is the study of the segments of language that carry meaning.
What is the smallest segment of language that carries meaning?
Morphemes.
True or false: Morphemes can be further subdivided into multiple segments of meaning.
False.
Which of the following is a morpheme?
Should.
True or false: there is only one type of morpheme.
False.
Is "re" in the following word a free or bound morpheme?
Reiterate
Bound morpheme.
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