Morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.
Current approaches to morphology conceive of morphemes as rules involving the linguistic context, rather than as isolated pieces of linguistic matter. They acknowledge that :

• meaning may be directly linked to suprasegmental phonological units, such as tone or stress.

• the meaning of a morpheme with a given form may vary, depending on its immediate environment.

Here are some kinds of morpheme types:

• An affix is a bound morpheme that is joined before, after, or within a root or stem.

• A bound morpheme is a grammatical unit that never occurs by itself, but is always attached to some other morpheme.

• A root is the portion of a word that

1. is common to a set of derived or inflected forms, if any, when all affixes are removed
2. is not further analyzable into meaningful elements, being morphologically simple, and
3. carries the principle portion of meaning of the words in which it functions.

• A free morpheme is a grammatical unit that can occur by itself. However, other morphemes such as affixes can be attached to it.

• A stem is the root or roots of a word, together with any derivational affixes, to which inflectional affixes are added. A stem consists minimally of a root, but may be analyzable into a root plus derivational morphemes. A stem may require an inflectional operation (often involving a prefix or suffix) in order to ground it into discourse and make it a fully understandable word. If a stem does not occur by itself in a meaningful way in a language, it is referred to as a bound morpheme.

• A clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but shows evidence of being phonologically bound to another word. Features

1. Phonologically bound but syntactically free
2. Function at phrase or clause level
3. Cannot be integrated into standard discourse without being bound to some other form
4. Often have grammatical rather than lexical meaning
5. Belong to closed classes like pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and conjunctions
6. Usually attach to the edges of words, outside of derivational and inflectional affixes
7. Often attach to several syntactic categories of words such as head noun, non-head noun, preposition, verb, or adverb
8. Phonologically unstressed