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A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. [1] Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes.
Surface forms of words are those found in natural language text. The corresponding lexical form of a surface form is the lemma followed by grammatical information (for example the part of speech, gender and number). In English give, gives, giving, gave and given are surface forms of the verb give. The lexical form would be "give", verb.
Bloomfield's "lexical morpheme" hypothesis: morphemes, affixes and roots alike are stored in the lexicon. Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian [17] and one Hockettian. [18] For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself.
The root morpheme is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced to smaller constituents. [3] The derivational morphemes carry only derivational information. [4] The affix is composed of all inflectional morphemes, and carries only inflectional information. [5]
verb-to-noun : -ance (deliver → deliverance) verb-to-noun : -er (write → writer) However, derivational affixes do not necessarily alter the lexical category; they may change merely the meaning of the base and leave the category unchanged. A prefix (write → re-write; lord → over-lord) rarely changes the lexical category in English.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Unlike derivational suffixes, English derivational prefixes typically do not change the lexical category of the base (and are so called class-maintaining prefixes). Thus, the word do, consisting of a single morpheme, is a verb, as is the word redo, which consists of the prefix re-and the base root do.
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (pl.: lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, [1] dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. [2] In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed.