Words and Morphemes :: essays research papers

Words and MorphemesThe MorphemeIn order to describe the take a hop of the lingual expressions (phrases, sentences, texts) in a language, we must describe how those complex expressions ar built from smaller parts, until ultimately we which the atoms of linguistic make up. The term morpheme is used to list to an atom of linguistic imprint.Most languages have a word equivalent the English word word, that appears at first to refer to precisely the sorts of minimum linguistic objects we have in mind. But there are devil reasons to reject word as the label for the minimal unit of linguistic form The term word is ambiguous, referring to at least three different sorts of object. In more languages, linguistic expressions we would want to identify as run-in are in fact structurally complex.We consider the second of these points here the first is taken up below.The following are all words of English purify cats cat+s catty cat+y dish helped help+ed unhelpful un+help+ful bake bake ry bak+ery baker 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 column can be broken mound into parts, as indicated in the right-hand column. It is not obvious that those in the left-hand(prenominal) column can be factored in the same way.A monomorphemic word like help is structurally complex in one finger it can be decomposed into distinct phonological elements (sounds, if you will), each associated with some word form of the speech organs. The same is true of helped of course, but that is not what leads up to member 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 meaning. Thus, the universal definition of morpheme is something like the following A morpheme is the minimal unit of linguistic expression th at is associated with a meaning.The term duality of patterning was current in the 1960s to refer to this throw 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 harmonise to their freedom of faderence free boundmorphological function blood stem affixmode of attachment prefix suffix put down 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 no(prenominal) of the component morphemes are free, as in