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Information about Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest units of written language).

The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.

English example:
The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-" (meaning not x), a bound morpheme; "-break-", a free morpheme; and "-able", a bound morpheme. "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.

The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", [s], in cats ([kæts]), but "-es", [iz], in dishes ([diʃɪz]), and even the voiced "-s", [z], in dogs ([dogz]). These are the allomorphs of "-s". It might even change entirely into -ren in children.

Types of morphemes

  • Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, i.e. "free".
  • Bound morphemes (or affixes) like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Unproductive, non-affix morphemes that exist only in bound form are known as "cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word.
  • Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on (as in the dog morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme s becomes dogs).
  • Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."
  • Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as [-z], [-s] or [-ɪz].

Other variants

Morphological analysis

In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a given sentence into a row of morphemes. It is closely related to Part-of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for these languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces. Famous Japanese morphological analysts include Juman and ChaSen.

References

Spencer, Andrew (1992). Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. 

See also

External links

Morpheme-based morphology is a view on morphology with the following three basic axioms:
  1. Baudoin’s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the same status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES.

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In linguistics, meaning is the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through language. Restated, the communication of meaning is the purpose and function of language.
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phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes meaning. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but abstractions of them. An example of a phoneme would be the /t/ found in words like tip,
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grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems.

In a phonemic orthography, a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme.
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A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetical value. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes.
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An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed.
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A suffix morpheme is an affix that comes either after the base morpheme or another suffix.

Bound inflectional affixes in present day English:
  • -s third person singular present
  • -ed past tense
  • -ing progressive/continuous
  • -en

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An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed.
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In linguistics, free morphemes (sometimes also referred to as unbound morphemes) are morphemes that can stand alone, unlike bound morphemes, which occur only as parts of words.
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A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of the same word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running
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Bound morphemes are morphemes that can occur only when attached to root morphemes.

Affixes are bound morphemes. Common English bound morphemes include: -ing, -ed, -er, and pre-.
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In linguistic morphology, a cranberry morpheme (or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned a meaning or a grammatical function but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other.
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In morpheme-based morphology, a null morpheme is a morpheme that is realized by a phonologically null affix (an empty string of phonological segments). In simpler terms, a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix.
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The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes.
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An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed.
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A suffix morpheme is an affix that comes either after the base morpheme or another suffix.

Bound inflectional affixes in present day English:
  • -s third person singular present
  • -ed past tense
  • -ing progressive/continuous
  • -en

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Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. It studies the problems of automated generation and understanding of natural human languages.
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This article contains Japanese text.
Without proper ,
you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of kanji or kana.

Japanese
日本語
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Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ; 华语/華語, Huáyǔ; or 中文, Zhōngwén) can be considered a language or language family.
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Part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging or POST), also called grammatical tagging, is the process of marking up the words in a text as corresponding to a particular part of speech, based on both its definition, as well as its context—i.e.
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ChaSen is a morphological parser for the Japanese language. This tool for analyzing morphemes was developed at the Matsumoto laboratory, Nara Institute of Science and Technology.
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International Phonetic Alphabet

Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The International
Phonetic Alphabet
History
Nonstandard symbols
Extended IPA
Naming conventions
IPA for English The
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In linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a phoneme or morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternate.
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A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of the same word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running
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B>Morphophonology (also morphophonemics, morphonology) is a branch of linguistics which studies:
  • The phonological structure of morphemes.
  • The combinatory phonic modifications of morphemes which happen when they are combined

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The chereme (From the Greek χέρι, "hand"), is an obsolete term for the basic unit of signed communication. It is functionally equivalent to the phonemes of spoken languages, and has been replaced by that term in the academic literature.
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grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems.

In a phonemic orthography, a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme.
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phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes meaning. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but abstractions of them. An example of a phoneme would be the /t/ found in words like tip,
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Sememe (Greek semaino - mean, signify) - semantical language unit of meaning, correlative to morpheme.

A sememe is a proposed unit of transmitted or intended meaning; it is atomic or indivisible.
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A floating tone is a morpheme that contains no consonants, no vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes.

An example occurs in Bambara. Bambara has two phonemic tones, high and low.
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