Introduction to Words and Morphemes Dr. Leany Nani Harsa, M. Si
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morphology. Like most linguistic knowledge, this is generally unconscious
knowledge.
one morpheme Boy
Desire two morphemes boy + ish desire + able three morphemes boy + ish + ness desire + able + ity four morphemes gentle + man + li + ness un + desire + able + ity 1.26 English Morpho - Syntax
more than four un + desire + man + li + ness anti + dis + establish + ment + ari + an + ism 2
A morpheme may be represented by a single sound, such as the morpheme “a” meaning “without” as in “amoral” or “asexual”, or by a single syllable, such as child and ish in child + ish. A morpheme may also consist of more than one syllable: by two syllables, as in camel, lady, and water; or by three syllables, as in Hackensack or crocodile; or by four or more syllables, as in hallucinate. The claim that words have structure might come as a surprise because normally speakers think of words as indivisible units of meaning. This is probably due to the fact that many words are morphologically simple. For example, the, fierce, desk, eat, boot, at, fee, mosquito, etc. cannot be divided up into smaller units that are themselves meaningful. It is impossible to say “-quito” is part of mosquito or -erce is part of “fierce”. But very many English words are morphologically complex. They can be broken down into smaller units that are meaningful called morphemes which is the smallest units of meaning. This is true of words like desk-s and boot-s, for instance, where desk refers to one piece of furniture and boot refers to one item of footwear, while in both cases the –s serves the grammatical function of indicating plurality. In short, the term morpheme is used to refer to the smallest, indivisible units of semantic content or grammatical function which words are made up of. A morpheme – the minimal linguistic unit – is thus an arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning that cannot be further analyzed. This may be too simple a definition, but it will serve our purposes for now. Every word in every language is composed of one or more morphemes. By definition, a morpheme cannot be decomposed into smaller units which are either meaningful by themselves or mark a grammatical function like singular or plural number in the noun. The decomposition of words into morphemes illustrates one of the fundamental properties of human language – discreteness. In all languages, discrete linguistic units combine in rule-governed ways to form larger units. Sound units combine to form morphemes, morphemes combine to form words, and words combine to form larger units – phrases and sentences. However, how do we know when to recognize a single sound or a group of sounds as representing a morpheme? Whether a particular sound or string of sounds is to be regarded as a manifestation of a morpheme depends on the word in which it appears. So, while un- represents a negative morpheme and has a meaning that can roughly be glossed as ‘not’ in words such as un-just and un-tidy, it has no claim to
BING4316/MODUL 1 1.27
morpheme status when it occurs in “uncle” or in “under”, since in these latter words it does not have any identifiable grammatical or semantic value, because –cle and –der on their own do not mean anything. (Morphemes will be separated with a hyphen in the examples). You can also say that morphemes can be compared to pieces of lego that can be used again as building blocks to form different words. Recurrent part of words that have the same meaning are isolated and recognized as manifestations of the same morpheme. Thus, the negative morpheme un-occurs in an indefinitely large number of words, besides those listed above. We find it in unwell, unsafe, unclean, unhappy, unfit, uneven, etc.
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