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Morpheme
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units of linguistic morphology
   
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In spoken language, morphemes are composed of Phoneme s, the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound.

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 Affix es.

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


TYPES OF MORPHEMES


  • Free Morpheme s like ''town'', ''dog'' can appear with other Lexeme s (as in ''town hall'' or ''dog house'') or they can stand alone, i.e. "free".

  • Bound Morpheme s (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 [-s or [-].



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

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SEE ALSO




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