Definition and Examples of Morphemes in English

In English grammar and morphology, a  morpheme is a meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word such as dog, or a word element, such as the -s at the end of dogs, that cant be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Morphemes are the  smallest units of meaning in a language. They are  commonly classified as either free morphemes, which can occur as separate words or  bound morphemes, which cant stand alone as words. Many words in English are made up of a single free morpheme. For example, each word in the following sentence is a distinct morpheme: I need to go now, but you can stay. Put another way, none of the nine words in that sentence can be divided into smaller parts that are also meaningful. Etymology From the French, by analogy with phoneme, from the Greek, shape, form. Examples and Observations A prefix may be a morpheme:What does it mean to pre-board? Do you get on before you get on?—George CarlinIndividual words may be morphemes:They want to put you in a box, but nobodys in a box. Youre not in a box.—John TurturroContracted word forms may be morphemes:They want to put you in a box, but nobodys in a box. Youre not in a box.—John TurturroMorphs and AllomorphsA word can be analyzed as consisting of one morpheme (sad) or two or more morphemes (unluckily; compare luck, lucky, unlucky), each morpheme usually expressing a distinct meaning. When a morpheme is represented by a segment, that segment is a morph. If a morpheme can be represented by more than one morph, the morphs are allomorphs of the same morpheme: the prefixes in- (insane), il- (illegible), im- (impossible), ir- (irregular) are allomorphs of the same negative morpheme.—Sidney Greenbaum, The Oxford English Grammar. Oxford University Press, 1996Morphemes as Meaningful Sequences of SoundsA word cannot be divided into morphemes just by sounding out its syllables. Some morphemes, like apple, have more than one syllable; others, like -s, are less than a syllable.  A morpheme is  a form (a sequence of sounds) with a recognizable meaning. Knowing a words early history, or etymology, may be useful in dividing it into morphemes, but the decisive factor is the form-meaning link.A morpheme may, however,  have more than one pronunciation or spelling.  For example, the regular noun plural  ending has two spellings (-s and -es) and three pronunciations (an s-sound as in backs, a z-sound as in bags, and a vowel plus z-sound as in batches).  Similarly, when the morpheme  -ate is followed by -ion (as in activate-ion), the t of -ate combines with the i of -ion as the sound sh (so we might spell the word activashun). Such allomorphic variation is typical of the morphemes of English, even though the spelling does not represent it.—John Algeo,  The Origins and Dev elopment of the English Language, 6th ed.  Wadsworth, 2010Grammatical TagsIn addition to serving as resources in the creation of vocabulary, morphemes supply grammatical tags to words, helping us to identify on the basis of form the parts of speech of words in sentences we hear or read. For example, in the sentence Morphemes supply grammatical tags to words, the plural morpheme ending {-s} helps identify morphemes, tags, and words as nouns; the {-ical} ending underscores the adjectival relationship between grammatical and the following noun, tags, which it modifies.—Thomas P. Klammer et al. Analyzing English Grammar. Pearson, 2007Language AcquisitionEnglish-speaking children usually begin to produce two-morpheme words in their third year, and during that year the growth in their use of affixes is rapid and extremely impressive. This is the time, as Roger Brown showed, when children begin to use suffixes for possessive words (Adams ball), for the plural (dogs), for present p rogressive verbs (I walking), for third-person singular present tense verbs (he walks), and for past tense verbs, although not always with complete corectness (I brunged it here) (Brown 1973). Notice that these new morphemes are all of them inflections. Children tend to learn derivational morphemes a little later and to continue to learn about them right through childhood . . ..—Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes, Morphemes and Literacy: A Starting Point. Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes, ed. by T. Nunes and P. Bryant. Routledge, 2006 Pronunciation: MOR-feem