Is there an estimate for the typical number of morphemes in natural language?

Question

Martinet's "double articulation of language": With phonemes we build morphemes, and with morphemes, words. I'd like to get a sense of how productive are these combinations: With only a few phonemes we can build more than X morphemes, and with those people have built more than Y words.

It's easy to count phonemes, and languages seem to range from ~13 to ~112. "Words" (lexemes) are fuzzy things, but we can get an easy rough estimate from dictionaries (more than 150k in the OED). So from the first level to the third we jump 3 to 4 orders of magnitude. But what about morphemes? What's a typical number of morphemes in a speaker's lexicon? (I'm not sure if we can use Chinese characters as a good representation of the set of morphemes, but if so it would suggest the low ten-thousands…)

Answer 1

The definition of a morpheme is that it is the smallest meaningful unit of language. Morphemes do constitute words but they also include root words. Therefore there's no point in trying to enumerate them in a single language let alone across languages.

You could enumerate things like inflectional or derivational morphemes which would are always very limited inventories but that would not really help you.

The point of the double articulation thesis is that you have a system of articulation meaning (morphemes, words, sentences, texts) that is built upon a system of articulation without meaning (phonemes, syllables, etc.). It is not intended to support a separate thesis about the productivity of language associated with Chomsky.

The thing to remember is that although strictly speaking morphemes are built out of phonemes, phonemes actually don't combine into morphemes. They combine into syllables which do not have a straightforward relationship with morphemes (a morpheme can consist of two syllables, e.g. 'simple' but one syllable can also represent two morphemes, e.g. 'runs'). Syllables then combine into metric/intonational units which again do not always map straightforwardly onto words, phrases, clauses and sentences.