Morpheme. is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members. Types of morphemes. Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, or "free". Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in Bound morphemes like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Morphemes existing in only one bound form are known as "cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word. Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on. (as in the dog morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme s becomes dogs). Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."
7. The word. Definition, morphological structure. Types of word stems.
A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound. As the word is the main unit of traditional grammatical theory, it serves the basis of the distinction which is frequently "drawn between morphology and syntax. Morphology deals with the internal structure of words, peculiarities of their grammatical categories and their semantics while traditional syntax deals with the rules governing combination of words in sentences (and texts in modern linguistics). We can therefore say that the word is the main unit of morphology. It is difficult to arrive at a one-sentence definition of such a complex linguistic unit as the word. It is also the basic nominative unit of language with the help of which the naming function of language is realized. One of the most characteristic features of the word is its indivisibility. As any other linguistic unit the word is a bilateral entity. It unites a concept and a sound image and thus has two sides - the content and expression sides: concept and sound form.
