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morpheme Definition

mor·pheme (môrfēm′)

noun

the smallest meaningful unit or form in a language: it may be an affix (Ex.: un- in undo or -er in doer) or a base (Ex.: do in undo)

Etymology: Fr morphème < Gr morphē, form + Fr -ème, as in phonème, phoneme

morpheme Related Forms
mor·phemic adjective mor·phemi·cally adverb
morpheme Usage Examples

Converse of object

  • call: Morphology is the study of the way words are formed from smaller units called morphemes.
  • use: This method uses morphemes - the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language to teach spelling of English words.
  • have: The word ' disheartened ' , for example, has four morphemes.
  • identify: Don't be put off by this technical term tho: you will easily be able to identify morphemes in Quechua for yourself.
  • bind: The term bound morpheme is then used to include both affixes and clitics.
  • speak: And for spoken morphemes consisting of a single phoneme, it is unclear what it would mean to reverse the direction of that phoneme.

Adjective modifier

  • lexical: Lexical morphemes are the " meaty " part of a word that has the clear meaning.
  • grammatical: Grammatical morphemes have a job rather than a meaning.
  • bound: As such, it is a bound morpheme because its meaning only exists in conjunction with the free morpheme ' acid ' .
  • free: In that context ' ant ' is a free morpheme.
  • same: Even more intractable problems arise where isolating what appears to be the same morpheme leaves behind a residue of uncertain status.
  • inflectional: Where phonological change brings this about, the offending inflectional morphemes are replaced.

Modifies a noun

  • pair: As for the comparison of high versus low frequency morpheme pairs, a significant frequency effect was found in both subject and item analyzes.
  • boundary: This segmentation cue was particularly helpful in resolving segmentation problems, when the initial fixation was located relatively far away from the morpheme boundary.
  • frequency: There was no effect of morpheme frequency on the IP effect.
  • word: These single morpheme words are sometimes called root or base words; an example is the single morpheme word, ' faith ' .

Noun used with modifier

  • root: The semantic relationships between items and the complex forms in which they are root morphemes were also shown to be predictive of response times.
  • frequency: As for the comparison of high versus low frequency morpheme pairs, a significant frequency effect was found in both subject and item analyzes.
  • component: Reading Finnish compound words: Eye fixations are affected by component morphemes.
  • agreement: However, a small group of verbs have no argument that corresponds to this agreement morpheme.

Browse dictionary entries near morpheme

  1. morphallaxis
  2. -morph
  3. morph
  4. morose
  5. moronic
  6. Moroni
  7. moron
  8. morocco
  9. Moro
  10. Morningstar Ratings
  1. morphemics
  2. Morpheus
  3. -morphic
  4. morphine
  5. morphing
  6. morphinism
  7. morpho-
  8. morphogen
  9. morphogenesis
  10. morphol