Overview
Words aren’t the smallest units of meaning. “Unhappiness” has three parts: Un- (not), happy (emotion), -ness (state of being). These parts are Lego bricks for building words.
Core Idea
Morpheme: The smallest meaningful unit in a language.
- Free Morpheme: Can stand alone (“Dog”).
- Bound Morpheme: Must be attached ("-s" in “Dogs”).
Formal Definition (if applicable)
Derivation vs. Inflection:
- Derivation: Creates a new word (Happy -> Unhappy). Changes meaning or part of speech.
- Inflection: Changes the grammatical form (Dog -> Dogs, Walk -> Walked). Same word, different version.
Intuition
- Agglutinative Languages: Sticking lots of morphemes together like a train. (Turkish, Finnish). “Evlerinizden” = From your houses (Ev-ler-iniz-den).
- Isolating Languages: One word = One morpheme. (Chinese, Vietnamese).
Examples
- Compounding: Joining two roots (Blackbird, Toothbrush).
- Acronyms: NASA, Laser.
- Portmanteau: Smog (Smoke + Fog), Brunch (Breakfast + Lunch).
Common Misconceptions
- “Long words are sophisticated.” (Often they are just piled-up morphology. “Antidisestablishmentarianism”).
Related Concepts
- Allomorph: Different sounds for the same morpheme. (Plural “-s” sounds like /s/ in “Cats” but /z/ in “Dogs”).
- Productivity: Can you use the rule to make new words? ("-able" is productive: “Googleable”).
Applications
- Natural Language Processing: Stemming (cutting off endings) to search for words.
- Neologisms: Inventing new words.
Criticism / Limitations
“Word” is hard to define. Is “ice cream” one word or two?
Further Reading
- Haspelmath, Understanding Morphology