Words And Morphemes
Words and Morphemes
The Morpheme
In order to describe the form of the linguistic expressions (phrases, sentences, texts) in a language, we must describe how those complex expressions are built from smaller parts, until ultimately we which the atoms of linguistic form. The term morpheme is used to refer to an atom of linguistic form.
Most languages have a word like the English word 'word', that appears at first to refer to precisely the sorts of minimal linguistic objects we have in mind. But there are two reasons to reject 'word' as the label for the minimal unit of linguistic form:
The term 'word' is ambiguous, referring to at least three different sorts of object.
In many languages, linguistic expressions we would want to identify as words are in fact structurally complex.
We consider the second of these points here; the first is taken up below.
The following are all words of English:
cat cats cat+s
catty cat+y
help helped help+ed
unhelpful un+help+ful......
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Approximate Word Count: 1462
Approximate Pages: 6 (250 words per double-spaced page)
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