University:
California State University, Northridge
Course:
ENGL 301 | Language and Linguistics
Academic year:

2024
Views:

215

Pages:

1
Author:

acocolesm9s

The Morpheme is the smallest unit of a language that can carry meaning. • Morphology is the study of words. The morpheme is the smallest unit of a language that can carry meaning. • Hence, every uncompounded word in English is a morpheme. The word "me" is one morpheme. The word "Mississippi" is also one morpheme. • Morphemes are certainly a major part of our lexicon (vocabulary) and we want to facilitate their acquisition as much as possible. We will discuss how later. • "Me" and "Missisippi" are called free morphemes because when you hear them by themselves, they have symbolic significance. • There is another smaller class of morphemes for which that isn't the case. • If you hear me say "ssssss," you would probably classify it as an English phoneme. • But any meaning you derived from this would be from the non linguistic channel--as a sign in an emotional graded communication.