Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A meaningful linguistic unit that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. The word man and the suffix -ed (as in walked) are morphemes.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Linguistics) The smallest unit of meaning of a language, which cannot be divided into smaller parts carrying meaning; it is usually smaller than a single wordform, such as the -ed morpheme of verbs in the past tense or the -s morpheme of nouns in the plural form.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun linguistics The smallest
linguistic unit within a word that can carry ameaning , such as "un-", "break", and "-able" in the word "unbreakable".
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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I think that the possessive morpheme is technically a clitic.
Preposterous Apostrophes III: The kings of England’s « Motivated Grammar 2007
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A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in the language.
Homeschool Reading Programs Help Homeschooling Parents Teach Effectively « Articles « Literacy News 2009
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A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in the language.
How to Teach Reading to Students With Dyslexia « Articles « Literacy News 2009
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Logograms are like Chinese characters: each represents a word or morpheme a morpheme is the smallest part of the word that has a meaning of its own.
I just had to do this test StyleyGeek 2007
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A Basic Model of Grammar Most theories of grammar accept that grammatical units are ordered hierarchically according to their size (a rank scale) o sentence (or clause complex) clause …. phrase (or group) … word … morpheme The morpheme is the smallest unit in grammar simply because it has no structure of its own.
Recently Uploaded Slideshows geniusroi 2010
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A Basic Model of Grammar Most theories of grammar accept that grammatical units are ordered hierarchically according to their size (a rank scale) o sentence (or clause complex) clause …. phrase (or group) … word … morpheme The morpheme is the smallest unit in grammar simply because it has no structure of its own.
Recently Uploaded Slideshows geniusroi 2010
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A unit which is different PHONOLOGICALLY and SEMANTICALLY is not considered to be a morpheme as a morpheme is a distinct meaningful unit in its own.
Recently Uploaded Slideshows nishantl 2009
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It makes direct use of the notion of morpheme in the definition of agglutinative and fusional languages.
Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium - Recent changes [en] 2008
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A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language; a bound morpheme is one that appears only in combination with another morpheme, such as the suffixes and prefixes of English.
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I'm using in its linguistics context where a "morpheme" is a unit of meaning, so: "poly" - many, "morphic" †"meanings.
COMIXTALK 2009
whichbe commented on the word morpheme
Not to be confused with morphine.
June 25, 2007
jmjarmstrong commented on the word morpheme
JM reckons morphemes rock!
March 24, 2011