17
votes
Can we conclude that morpheme is ALWAYS greater than syllable?
In English, one counterexample is the very common '-ed’ (often /d/) ending: ‘filled’ is 1 syllable, and the morphemes are ‘fill’ + ‘-ed’ (/d/).
- 2,502
16
votes
How to split pronouns 'whom' and 'whose' into morphs?
You could analyze them that way, sure. Perhaps there's an -m morpheme that indicates the accusative case, as seen in who-m, hi-m, the-m.
But I don't think this is a very useful analysis, ...
- 63.8k
11
votes
Accepted
What exactly a morpheme is
The most important fact about "morpheme" is that it is a claim about the state of a language as it exists at a specific time; it is a concept of synchronic analysis, not diachronic analysis (etymology)...
- 81.9k
9
votes
Examples of words that are monomorphemic in English, but polymorphemic in other languages
As I understand your interest, you don't need the relationship to be English (monomorphemic) to Other (polymorphemic), it works just as well if you have English being the polymorphemic example and ...
- 81.9k
8
votes
Examples of words that are monomorphemic in English, but polymorphemic in other languages
An example that springs to mind: English "love" vs. Danish "kærlighed", which is actually tri-morphemic, consisting of "kær" (dear), "-lig" (derivational morpheme creating adjectives, thus "kærlig" = "...
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8
votes
Examples of words that are monomorphemic in English, but polymorphemic in other languages
One easy source for this is words that used to be polymorphemic, but fossilized by the time they reached English.
For example, "desire", "depend", "destroy", "descend", and "delete" are irreducible ...
- 63.8k
7
votes
Accepted
Why is it problematic to assume a null morpheme signifying the singular number of nouns in German?
In short, assuming invisible stuff is always problematic from a theoretical point of view, because you can never really prove it's there, and even worse, you can never really prove it's not there - ...
- 6,478
6
votes
Is a full stop a morpheme?
Morphemes are sequences of phonemes that have meaning. A full stop or period doesn’t correspond to any sequence of phonemes; so it’s not a representation of a morpheme. It is however related to ...
- 4,960
6
votes
Accepted
Is longish an inflected form of long or a lexeme?
This really comes down to how you define derivation versus inflection. The line between these two categories tends to be incredibly fuzzy and difficult to determine. For instance, if your definition ...
- 63.8k
6
votes
Accepted
Question about the concept of free morpheme
A lot of modern linguists use the concept of "free morpheme," which refers to morphemes that can occur as words on their own, as opposed to "bound morphemes," which can only occur in words that have ...
- 2,364
5
votes
Are all morphemes meaningful?
No, there are a small class of morphemes called interfixes which are needed for phonological reasons, but are not considered to carry any semantic content. One example is the i in humaniform.
- 6,126
5
votes
Are the suffixes of such ordinal numbers as fir-st, seco-nd, thi-rd and six-th derivational or inflectional?
Introductory textbooks sometimes tout "changes the part of speech" as being the key feature of a derivational affix. But this definition has a lot of flaws, and you've run into one of them.
...
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5
votes
Are words such as sandwich,pumpkin and dictionary monomorphemic?
It depends on your theory of morphemes and how to diagnose bimorphemicity. A fairly restrictive theory of morphology holds that a word can be decomposed into multiple morphemes only if the substrings ...
- 81.9k
4
votes
What exactly a morpheme is
You are right that historically, those words are made up from separate units. Morpheme could be used in a historical sense; but it is usually used synchronically.
In present day English, compute does ...
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4
votes
Why is recognition based on phonemes and not syllables or morphemes?
Assuming the goal of writing a speech recognition program that does what the human mind does, a large non-linguistic front end must be dealt with first (a front end that is decidedly not part of ...
- 81.9k
4
votes
Can we conclude that morpheme is ALWAYS greater than syllable?
It is perfectly possible to have three morphemes in one syllable. Consider the word sixths which is comprised of the morphemes /sɪks/, /θ/, and /s/.
So we can easily prove that many syllables ...
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4
votes
Are words such as sandwich,pumpkin and dictionary monomorphemic?
A morpheme is the "smallest meaningful lexical item", according to Wikipedia. In other words morphemes are the smallest individual components of words that still carry some meaning or ...
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4
votes
A question regarding allomorphs
It depends entirely on your theories of morphology, syntax, semantics and phonology. You inject the possibility of the words being different in terms of meaning as relevant, so we can start semantic ...
- 81.9k
3
votes
Are all complex words polymorphemic?
I presume you are talking about Complex vs Compound words.
A complex word consists of a stem and an affix which the affix does not have any meanings alone.
A compound word on the other hand has an ...
- 1,265
3
votes
Are all morphemes meaningful?
Traditionally, a morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of language. Under this assumption, every morpheme is meaningful by defnition.
However, this is not always that simple.
The ...
- 6,478
3
votes
Are all morphemes meaningful?
Well it depends on how you define "morpheme". Usually, it's defined as a sign, i.e. a form-meaning correspondence. In this case, the answer is "yes" by definition (and the -i- in humaniform is not a ...
- 494
3
votes
Can we conclude that morpheme is ALWAYS greater than syllable?
We can prove existentially that the shortest morpheme is a single consonant, Examples from Levantine Arabic: -ʃ "verbal negation"; -t "1sg perfective". In Gurage, single phonological features are ...
- 81.9k
3
votes
How is the word 'second' phonologically split into syllables?
Syllable division isn't an evident phonetic fact: people disagree about where it falls (and have for quite a long time). Most arguments about this topic depend critically on which theoretical ...
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3
votes
How to translate words like "the" to other languages?
Determiners (the standard term for words like "the") have long been a problem for formal semantics, which I think is what you're trying to do here—translate a sentence into some formalized, ...
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3
votes
Examples of languages that lost auxiliary verbs
Russian is an classical example of such a language. In Russian, the present tense forms of the verb “to be” merged into one, есть, and the use of his single form as a copula practically stopped, thus ...
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2
votes
About allomorphs of morphemes
It is by definition meaningless (contains a false presupposition). A morpheme is an abstraction ranging over a particular set of surface strings having certain properties of form and meaning. An ...
- 81.9k
2
votes
verbal or adjectival suffix -ed in the word "excited"
I think "excited" is definitely an adjective in the first sentence, and most likely an adjective in both sentences. It looks like some people have argued that it must be a verb in the second because ...
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2
votes
Can we conclude that morpheme is ALWAYS greater than syllable?
While many others have pointed out that there are many cases where multiple morphemes can exist in one syllable, it is also possible to have morphemes which in themselves do not constitute a syllable:
...
- 56
2
votes
Does adding the suffix -ly to a noun or an adjective provide morphological evidence for word class?
Since -ly can be affixed to nouns (gentlemanly, friendly, ghostly, spritely) and adjectives (unlikely, quickly, heavily, lightly), but not to verbs, then it isn't much use as a diagnostic of word ...
- 81.9k
2
votes
Can we conclude that morpheme is ALWAYS greater than syllable?
In Spanish, the word "era" (was) can take no syllables, for example:
Adorarte para mi era obsesión
The part "mi era obsesión", when transcribed in IPA, would become /mi̯e.ɾao̯b.se.sjon/, wherein ...
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