Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Greek Morphemes, Khoff, Mountainside Middle School English vocabulary elements , Keith M. Denning, Brett Kessler, William R. Leben, William Ronald Leben, Oxford University Press US, 2007, 320pp, p. 127, ISBN 978-0-19-516802-0 at Google Books
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.
For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech , and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number , tense , and aspect .
These languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio, a highly regular morphology, and a tendency for verb forms to include morphemes that refer to several arguments besides the subject (polypersonalism). Another feature of polysynthetic languages is commonly expressed as "the ability to form words that are equivalent to whole sentences in other ...
Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us; Pages for logged out editors learn more
Words can be formed purely from bound morphemes, as in English permit, ultimately from Latin per "through" + mittō "I send", where per-and -mit are bound morphemes in English. However, they are often thought of as simply a single morpheme. Per is not a bound morpheme; a bound morpheme, by definition, cannot stand alone as a word.
In these cases, a given morpheme (i.e., a component of a word) has a fixed spelling even though it is pronounced differently in different words. An example is the past tense suffix- ed , which may be pronounced variously as /t/, /d/, or /ᵻd/ [a] (for example, pay / ˈ p eɪ /, payed / ˈ p eɪ d /, hate / ˈ h eɪ t /, hated / ˈ h eɪ t ɪ d /).
The principal types of graphemes are logograms (more accurately termed morphograms [10]), which represent words or morphemes (for example Chinese characters, the ampersand "&" representing the word and, Arabic numerals); syllabic characters, representing syllables (as in Japanese kana); and alphabetic letters, corresponding roughly to phonemes ...