Morpheme

A morpheme is not identical to a word.

This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own.

When it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function (such as the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural).

In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.

The main difference between them is that a morpheme sometimes does not stand alone, but a word, by definition, always stands alone.

In general linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone.

When a morpheme stands by itself, it is considered as a root because it has a meaning of its own (such as the morpheme cat).

Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of root morphemes.

The linguistics field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", only found bound to noun phrases.

The linguistics field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in pronunciation but are semantically identical.

In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme, that is, when a unit of meaning varies in sound without changing the meaning.

For example, the English plural marker -(e)s of regular nouns can be pronounced (bats), (bugs), or, (buses), depending on the final sound of the noun's plural form.

In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence.

For example, the English plural marker -(e)s of regular nouns can be pronounced (bats), (bugs), or, (buses), depending on the final sound of the noun's plural form.

The plural morpheme in English is suffixed to the end of most nouns.

* Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb, or the number, gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun, without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech).

Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify a verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class.

Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or content, and function morphemes have more of a grammatical role.

Content morphemes have lexical denotations that are not dependent on the context or on other morphemes.

* Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change the semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word.

However, it is important to note that derivations and inflections can share homonyms, that being, morphemes that have the same sound, but not the same meaning.

Examples of ambiguous situations are the preposition over and the determiner your, which seem to have concrete meanings but are considered function morphemes since their role is to connect ideas grammatically.

* Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb, or the number, gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun, without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech).

A classifier, or measure word, is a word or morpheme used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other determiners to be applied to the noun.

* Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb, or the number, gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun, without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech).

Below are some examples of number affixes for nouns (where the inflecting morphemes are underlined):

Many other adverbs, however, are not related to adjectives in this way; they may be derived from other words or phrases, or may be single morphemes.

In morphology, a null morpheme or zero morpheme is a morpheme that has no phonetic form.

In natural language processing for Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of morphemes.

In linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization.

Greek morphemes are parts of words originating from the Greek language.

The Formative List in Distributed Morphology differs, thus, from the Lexicon in traditional generative grammar, which includes the lexical items (such as words and morphemes) in a language.

A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains neither consonants nor vowels, but only tone.

In natural language processing for Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of morphemes.

In the modern varieties, it is usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; In contrast, English has plenty of multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as "seven", "elephant", "para-" and "-able".

Nanosyntax is an approach to syntax in which the terminal nodes of syntactic parse trees may be reduced to units smaller than a morpheme.