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A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. [1] Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes.
For example, the morpheme ten-in tenant was originally derived from the Latin word tenere, "to hold", and the same basic meaning is seen in such words as "tenable" and "intention." But as ten- is not used in English to form new words, most linguists would not consider it to be a morpheme at all.
Greek Morphemes, Khoff, Mountainside Middle School English vocabulary elements , Keith M. Denning, Brett Kessler, William R. Leben, William Ronald Leben, Oxford University Press US, 2007, 320pp, p. 127, ISBN 978-0-19-516802-0 at Google Books
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. [1] [2] Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning.
The isolation form of a morpheme is the form in which that morpheme appears in isolation (when it is not subject to the effects of any other morpheme). In the case of a bound morpheme, such as the English past tense ending "-ed", it is generally not possible to identify an isolation form since such a morpheme does not occur in isolation.
In linguistic morphology a cranberry morpheme (also called unique morpheme or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an independent meaning and grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from another.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Agglutinative languages have words containing several morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from one another in that each morpheme represents only one grammatical meaning and the boundaries between those morphemes are easily demarcated; that is, the bound morphemes are affixes, and they may be individually identified.