A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language. It is the smallest grammatical unit in a language.
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. 1  meaning may be directly linked to suprasegmental phonological units, such as tone or stress. In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. A general rule to follow to determine the category of a morpheme is: 1  Content morphemes include free morphemes that are nouns, adverbs, adjective, and verbs. 2  Function morphemes can be free morphemes that are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions. Morpheme vs Phoneme. Difference between morpheme and phoneme is very important in linguistics. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. A phoneme, on the other hand, is the smallest unit of speech. The significant difference between the two is that while a morpheme carries a meaning a phoneme does not. • Phonemes are the basic units of speech of a language that are used to create morphemes and words. • The main difference between a morpheme and phoneme is that while a morpheme carries a concrete meaning, a phoneme itself does not carry any meaning. Images Courtesy: 1  Words by Martin (CC BY-SA 2.0). It is also important to note two types of affixes: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphemes can only be a suffix, and they transform the function of a word, such as adding an '-ly' suffix to the base noun of 'friend.' This becomes the word 'friendly,' which has 2 morphemes. The-ly is an inflectional morpheme because it changes the noun into an adjective. Derivational morphemes can be either a suffix or a prefix, and they have the ability to transform either the function or the meaning of a word. An example would be adding the suffix '-less' to the noun 'meaning.' The suffix then makes the word the opposite of itself, thus drastically changing meaning. It actually has five syllables, though, which is a good example of why morphemes and syllables are not synonymous. Non-is an example of a prefix, or a morpheme that precedes a base morpheme. Perish is an example of a base morpheme, as it gives the word its essential meaning. -Able is an example of a suffix, or a morpheme that follows a base morpheme. Derivational morphemes can be either a suffix or a prefix, and they have the ability to transform either the function or the meaning of a word. An example would be adding the suffix '-less' to the noun 'meaning.' The suffix then makes the word the opposite of itself, thus drastically changing meaning. In linguistics, morphology /mɔrˈfɒlɵdʒi/ is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, parts of speech, intonations and stresses, or implied context. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages. Polysynthetic languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed of many morphemes. The Chukchi word təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən, for example, meaning I have a fierce headache, is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən that may be glossed 1 Inflectional morphemes modify a verb 's tense or a noun's number without affecting the word's meaning or class. 2  Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding-s to the root dog to form dogs and adding-ed to wait to form waited. 3  In English, there are eight inflections. A general rule to follow to determine the category of a morpheme is: 1  Content morphemes include free morphemes that are nouns, adverbs, adjective, and verbs. 2  Function morphemes can be free morphemes that are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions.
http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMorpheme.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-morpheme-and-vs-phoneme/ http://study.com/academy/lesson/morphemes-examples-definition-types.html http://study.com/academy/lesson/morphemes-examples-definition-types.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme
what is a system morpheme