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1.2.1. Morphemes

Characteristics of morphemes

Problem morphemes

1.2.2. How to analyze words

The 4 Steps of Word Analysis

Word analysis involves breaking a word into its morphemes. So what exactly is a morpheme? Literally, the word "morpheme" means 'an element in a system of forms.' Linguists define it more precisely this way:

Language works because human beings can form relationships between forms and meanings. A form can be any kind of physical structure. It is easy to think of the letters on a page as shapes or forms, but what about spoken language? Think of the sounds which reach your ears when a speaker says the words "cat" and then "bird." These two words sound different, just as the written forms of these two words look different. From the point of view of our auditory system, these two words have different physical structures, or auditory forms. Each different form evokes a different meaning. We say that each form plus the meaning linked to it is a single morpheme.

In the examples of "cat" and ""bird," each morpheme was a separate word, but this isn't always the case. We could put the two morphemes together to form the compound word "catbird." Here the forms of the two morphemes have been added together to make a new form unit: a single word having two morphemes. At the same time, the meanings of the two morphemes have been combined to create a new meaning: 'a species of songbird that sounds somewhat like a cat'.

Clearly morphemes and words are not necessarily the same thing. Words may be composed of one or many morphemes. In fact, most long words in English can be broken down into smaller units. The longest word in English (according to Webster's Unabridged Dictionary) contains 45 letters; it can be broken down into 9 morphemes.

Characteristics of morphemes

Morphemes have four defining characteristics:

1. They cannot be subdivided.
2. They add meaning to a word.
3. They can appear in many different words.
4. They can have any number of syllables.

Let's look more closely at each characteristic.

1) Morphemes cannot be subdivided and retain the same meaning.

By definition, morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language. If you try to divide a morpheme into smaller pieces, all you will get are sounds. The individual sounds of language don't have any meaning by themselves; they have to be combined with other sounds before they have meaning. For example, we could break the morpheme "cat" down into the "c" sound, the "a" sound, and the "t" sound. But none of these sounds by itself conveys any meaning; they all have to be put together -- in just the right order -- before a listener will be able to understand the meaning 'feline animal.'

Of course, the sounds could be arranged in other ways to convey other meanings. We could combine just the "a" and "t" sounds, or put the three sounds in reverse order, i.e. "t" + "a" + "c". These arrangements of sounds convey meanings that are not related to the concept of a feline animal. So, these new sound patterns are different morphemes (the morphemes "at" and "tack").

2) Morphemes add meaning to a word.

Each morpheme contributes to the overall meaning of the word. However, some morphemes may affect the overall meaning much more than others. For example, when we began with the morpheme "cat" and added the morpheme "bird," we created a new word with a radically different meaning. In another case, we could begin with "cat" and instead add the morpheme "-s" (meaning 'plural') to get "cats." Here we've changed the overall meaning of the word from 'one cat' to 'more than one cat.' This meaning change is not nearly as significant as in the first case. We have only refined our original concept a bit in terms of number, rather than shifting the meaning to a completely different type of creature.

3) Morphemes can appear in many different words.

Morphemes are recyclable. Word analysis is such a powerful skill because the same morphemes show up over and over in many different words. Once you've learned the meaning of a morpheme and learned to spot it in its different forms, you'll know something about the hundreds of words that use it. For example, in Morpheme Set 1, you are studying the Latin morpheme duc 'lead,draw,pull'. Here are a few of the words which use it:

reduce	'to pull back'
deduce	'to draw away from'
seduce	'to lead apart'
produce	'to pull forward'
induce	'to lead into'
conduct	'to lead together'

Another example is ped 'foot' (also from Latin).

pedal	'pertaining to the foot'
pedestrian	'one who use his/her feet for transportation'
biped	'a creature with two feet ' According to legend, Plato defined man as 'a featherless biped.' Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it to the academy saying, "Here is Plato's man."
pedometer	'an instrument for measuring distance traveled by foot '
pedigree	'foot of a crane' This came from Old French pied de grue. It was thought that the diagrams of one's lineage (family tree charts) looked like a crane's foot.
expedite	'to free the feet ' i.e. speed up progress
impede	'to have something in the way of one's foot ' i.e. to be slowed down

4) Morphemes can have any number of syllables.

Don't confuse morphemes with syllables. A syllable is a unit of sound, a morpheme is a unit of meaning.

Sometimes a single morpheme will have several syllables. For example, English speakers would probably consider the word "hurricane" as a single morpheme (although a speaker of Carib, the language from which it originated, might be able to break it into several morphemes).

At other times a morpheme will use less than one syllable. For example, cats has two morphemes in one syllable: 'feline' + 'plural'. For the possessive form cats', we have the meanings 'feline' + 'plural' + 'belonging to' -- three morphemes in a single syllable. Although the possessive (') is shown in writing, it is not pronounced. However the morpheme clearly exists in that word because the words cats and cats' are used differently. The second word would only be used in a situation where the concept of possession is required.

Syllables may divide a morpheme. This is a good reason to ignore syllables when you are doing word analysis. For example, the word "pregnant" has three morphemes:

pre- /	gn /	-ant
'before'	'birth'	'one who'
literally 'one who is before giving birth'

However, there are only two syllables: preg + nant. The morpheme gn is split in half by the syllable structure of the word.

Problems with morphemes

It would nice if there were always a neat one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning, i.e. if each meaning always had its own individual form. Unfortunately, natural human language isn't like that. Now we'll take a look at some potentially tricky situations that can arise. As we consider these problems, the important thing to keep in mind is that a morpheme is a FORM + MEANING unit; both parts of the unit must be considered when we are trying to decide if we are dealing with one morpheme or two.

1. One form, two (or more) meanings.

Two different meanings can be expressed using the same arrangement of sounds. Since there are clearly two different and unrelated meanings, we would want to say that there are two different morphemes. For example, in Morpheme Set 2, we will learn the two morphemes,

in- 'not' in words like incapable and insufficient, and

in- 'into, within' , as in invade and include.

Similarly,

gon 'birth,type,origin' as gonorrhea, and

gon 'knee,angle' as in diagonal, are not related.

These similarities are just accidental and typically the origins of the two morphemes are completely unrelated.

2. Two (or more) forms, one meaning.

When two different forms have the same meaning, they could be different morphemes -- or they might be a single morpheme. We'll take a look at both situations.

a. Two forms, one meaning = two morphemes

There are two situations in which two forms have the same meaning, but they are different morphemes.

(1) In the first case, the forms are usually rather different from one another. For example, consider

andr 'man,male' as in android, and

vir 'man,male' as in virile.

Both morphemes mean the same thing, but they are very different in form. They have completely different origins, and we want to think of them as different morphemes.

(2) In the second case, the forms may be the same or very similar, but they came into English from different sources. For example,

in- 'into, within' is a prefix English borrowed from Latin. We also have

in 'into, within', a native English preposition.

If we traced the histories of these two morphemes, we would find that they go back to a single morpheme which existed in the parent language of both Latin and English. Since they come ultimately from the same source, they are very similar in form. However, they came into English through very different historical pathways; one is part of the native vocabulary, the other is borrowed. For this reason, it is reasonable to think of them as separate morphemes. This situation is relatively rare.

b. Two (or more) forms, one meaning = one morpheme

Sometimes two forms with the same meaning may be alternate forms of the same morpheme. For example, in Morpheme Set 1 we have

a- and an- , different forms of a Greek morpheme meaning 'not, without'.

Another case is

pan- and pant- , which are different forms of a Greek morpheme meaning 'all,overall'.

Here the two forms are very similar, often differing in only one consonant or vowel. They typically result from a situation in which an original single form adapted its beginning or ending sounds to the sounds found in other morphemes it combined with. For example, the Greek 'not' morpheme is found in the form a- before roots beginning with consonants, and an- before roots beginning with vowels, just like the English words "a" and "an."

The alternate forms of a single morpheme are called allomorphs, literally 'other forms.' We'll spend a lot of time in later units examining different types of allomorphs.

1.2.2. How to analyze words

As we mentioned in WebLecture 1.1, we will only be analyzing words which were borrowed from either Latin or Greek. We won't be able to analyze Exotic words, nor will we be analyzing Native words. As you learn more and more morphemes from the Classical languages, you will begin to recognize them in words you encounter.

There are four steps in the complete analysis of a word. They are:

1. Parse
2. Gloss
3. Give a literal meaning
4. Give a dictionary definition

You may be asked to do all or part of these steps on exercises and exams. (No dictionary definitions will be necessary on exams.)

• 1) PARSE

To parse a word means to divide it into its morphemes.

On homework problems, look for morphemes that you have memorized. Then use the glossary to find other morphemes that you don't know. DO NOT pay any attention to the syllables in the word. As we discussed above, morphemes often to do not correspond to the syllables of the word. Write the word with slashes between the morphemes and include any hyphens that are shown with the morpheme.

For example, consider the word "repellent." Using the morphemes in Set 1, we can parse it this way:

re-  /  pel  /  (l)  /  -ent

Notice that the word contains an extra letter which does not go with either of the morphemes beside it. You should always try to use each letter as part of a morpheme; however, sometimes this isn't possible. In many cases, the extra letters are relics of the grammar of Latin and Greek. In other cases, such as this one, the extra letter is required by the spelling conventions of English. You should include extra letters in the parsed word, but enclose them in parenthesis to show that they do not contribute to the meaning of the word. Since these extra letters have no meaning, we will not refer to them as morphemes.

• 2) GLOSS

To gloss means to give the meaning for a morpheme.

In a complete analysis, you need to provide a meaning for each morpheme. The gloss is written underneath the parsed morpheme in single quotes.

For example,

re-  /	pel  /	(l)  /	-ent
'again, back'	'push'		A, N

Notice that there are sometimes two or more meanings for a single morpheme. They should all be included as part of the gloss. Also, there is no gloss for the extra letter in parenthesis, since it is not a morpheme and has no meaning. Finally, notice that the last morpheme is glossed 'A, N.' The letters stand for 'ADJECTIVE, NOUN' and indicate that the word can be used either as an ADJECTIVE or a NOUN. We will discuss how to differentiate ADJECTIVES and NOUNS in WebLecture 1.3. If the word is given to you in a sentence, you will need to determine whether it is being used as an ADJECTIVE or a NOUN and give only the appropriate gloss.

• 3) GIVE A LITERAL MEANING

The final step in word analysis is to use the meanings from the glosses to construct a literal meaning for the word. For our sample word, we might construct a literal meaning this way:

re-  /	pel  /	(l)  /	-ent
'again, back'	'push'		A, N
'something which pushes back'

A literal meaning should be a phrase which sounds sensible to English speakers. Constructing such a phrase often requires a little bit of creativity. For example, in the word "repellent," the concept of 'back' comes before the concept of 'push'; however in the literal meaning, the order of these two concepts is reversed. It is often necessary to rearrange the glosses in order to arrive at a sensible English phrase. Also, if two meanings are possible, it is usually necessary to choose between them.

• 4) GIVE A DICTIONARY DEFINITION

In our example, the literal meaning of the word is very close to the dictionary definition. This is not always the case. Frequently, the literal meaning must be metaphorically extended to arrive at the actual meaning of the word. Later in the course, we will discuss how meanings can shift.

Also, the meaning of a word can vary depending on the context in which the word is found. For example, the word "morphology" can be analyzed this way:

morph   /	(o)   /	log   /	-y
'shape, form'		'study, speak'	A, N
'the study of shape or form'

By using the principles of word analysis, we can determine that "morphology" is 'the study of shape or form.' But in order to know exactly what kind of forms are being studied, we need to know the context. In the context of a Biology class, we are probably studying the form of plants and animals, but in a Linguistics class, we would be studying the form of words.

Usually, the literal meaning plus your knowledge of metaphorical shifts of meaning and the context in which the word was found are sufficient to understand it. In a few cases, the meaning shift is so great that you may need to consult a dictionary. Some homework problems will require a dictionary definition, but this will not be necessary on exams. All exam words will use literal definitions, or definitions that are transparently derived from literal definitions.

Copyright 1998 by the Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon.