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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Morphology and Word Formation

Morpheme

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/ˈmɔːfiːm/nounCore term

In linguistics & grammar, morpheme means: The smallest part of a word that has its own meaning or grammatical job, such as un-, happy and -ness in unhappiness.

In Turkish: biçimbirim, morfem

How it is used

Linguists count and label morphemes when they analyse words. Free morphemes can stand alone (book); bound morphemes cannot (-s, re-). Teachers use the idea to show learners how word families are built.

Example sentences

  1. The word 'teachers' has three morphemes: teach, -er and -s.

  2. In the Turkish word 'evlerimizden', each morpheme adds one piece of meaning: house, plural, 'our' and 'from'.

Common collocations

  • free morpheme
  • bound morpheme
  • grammatical morpheme
  • morpheme boundary
  • morphologyThe study of the internal structure of words: how they are built from smaller meaningful parts such as roots, prefixes and suffixes.
  • affixA piece added to a word to change its meaning or grammatical form, such as a prefix at the start (re-) or a suffix at the end (-ed).
  • rootThe core part of a word that carries its basic meaning and cannot be broken into smaller meaningful parts, such as 'form' in reformation or 'kitap' in kitaplık.
  • phonemeThe smallest unit of sound that can change meaning in a particular language, such as /p/ and /b/, which make pin and bin different words in English.
  • stemThe part of a word to which inflectional endings are added; it can be a bare root (walk) or a root with derivational affixes (teacher in teachers).

More terms: Morphology and Word Formation

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