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I'm currently working on a project that that's aimed at helping people find words that match their feelings and thoughts, as opposed to looking for words in a traditional dictionary. It would begin with categorical lemmes, then a list of the most common morphs to convert to lexical categories, and then a categorical list of affixes...essentially, a practical dictionary of morphemes. Does such a thing exist in English?

At the request of others, here are illustrations:

Categorical lemmes - if I'm trying to express an emotion, I'm only interested in an exhaustive list of emotions and their subtle/categorical differences. or perhaps I'm trying to describe the sound my car is making and need a list of words that represent the sounds cars make, ideally with a wav file attached.

Common morphs would include things like "s" and "es" are used to pluralize something (along with the rules for which one to use) or 'ly' can be used to convert adjectives to adverbs.

Affixes would provide the limited meanings each one is used to represent, like 'tion' converts verbs to abstract nouns, or "pre" indicates before.

We can look some affixes up in some dictionaries, but not from a 'useful' perspective. In other words, if I want a morp that means 'before,' I would look up before and discover pre...not the other way around.

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  • Can you give a more detailed example?
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Commented Nov 16, 2021 at 13:37
  • Wordnet? Framenet?
    – jlawler
    Commented Nov 16, 2021 at 23:10
  • @jlawler I love the work they have both done but wish they provided the same data in the format I'm wanting, categorically. I've updated the question to provide an illustration of that. Also, they don't provide definitions to morphs, just the lemmes and beyond--try looking up 'ing' or 'ed' for example and they don't tell you what they mean as morphs.
    – Christopher
    Commented Nov 17, 2021 at 21:24
  • Well,, of course they don't. Inflections don't have meanings. Luckily, English has very few inflections.
    – jlawler
    Commented Nov 18, 2021 at 4:33
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    Derivational morphemes don't have clear meanings any more than inflectional ones. Only lexical morphemes (roots for nouns, verbs, adjectives) can be said to have "meaning" in the dictionary sense, and of course that's what you find in dictionaries. Other stuff is often ambiguous, vague, or simply arbitrary in what it can be said to "mean".
    – jlawler
    Commented Nov 20, 2021 at 18:02

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