morpheme
morpheme
Definition
mor·pheme (môr′fēm′)
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
mor·phe′mic adjective
mor·phe′mi·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
- morphallaxis
- -morph
- morph
- morose
- moronic
- Moroni
- moron
- morocco
- Moro
- Morningstar Ratings
- morphemics
- Morpheus
- -morphic
- morphine
- morphing
- morphinism
- morpho-
- morphogen
- morphogenesis
- morphol
