The first difficulty is that you have your own individual stock of morphemes just as you have a vocabulary that is peculiarly your own. The second difficulty is that persons may kno a given morpheme but differ in the degree to which they are aware of its presesnce in various words. It is likely, for instance that most speaker English know the agentive suffix-er meaning “one who, that which” and recognize it in countless words like singer and acor. But many may only dimly sense this morpheme in professor and completely overlook it in voucher, cracker and tumbler. Thus can we say that sweater has enough pulse in its –er to be considered a two morpheme word? This will vary with the awarness of different individuals. A less simple case is seen in this group : nose, noseful, nosey, nasal, nuzzle, nozzle, nostril, nasturtium. Only a linguistically knowledgeable person would see the morpheme nose in eaxh of these words. Others will show considerable differences in awarness.
Thus, we conclude that one individual’s morphemes are not those of an other. This is no cause for deep concern, though it may be source of controversy in the classroom, for we are dealing with the morphemes of the English language, not merely with the individual morpheme inventories of Tom, Dick , Hary and Sadie.
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