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Morpheme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 un...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme |
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MORPHEME – Encyclopedia.com has MORPHEME articles, MORPHEME pictures, video and information at Encyclopedia.com - a FREE online library ... MORPHEME. In LINGUISTICS, a minimal unit of form and meaning. There are many variations in how the term is used and understood, arising in the main from a distinction between language...
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Britannica online encyclopedia article on morpheme (linguistics), in linguistics, the smallest grammatical unit of speech; ... CREATE MY morpheme NEW DOCUMENT...
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Morphemes may have lexical meaning, as the word bird, or syntactic meaning, as the plural –s (see inflection; etymology). Words are minimal free forms, but a word may contain more than one morpheme. For example, treatment contains two, treat and the derivational noun-forming suffix -ment.
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It is important to recognize that there is no one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning, and that what counts for identification as a morpheme is both form AND meaning. Let's consider some potentially tricky situations that can arise in deciding whether we're dealing with a single morpheme or more than one:
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Such a unit is called a morpheme. Note that by this definition a full-fledged word like cat is also a morpheme ... In a word consisting of more than one morpheme, there is normally at least one lexical morpheme. Thus the word walking consists of two morphemes, a lexical morpheme, walk, and a grammatical morpheme, -ing.
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