I
had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant,
despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wideldy
umberella... when I saw her... She was a descript person... Her hair was kempt,
her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way (‘How I met my wife’,
Jack Winter, The New Yorker, 25 July 1994)
A
morpheme was defined as the basic element of meaning, a phonological form that
is arbitrarily united with a particular meaning and that cannot be analyzed
into simpler elements. This definition has presented problems for linguistic
analysis for many years, although it holds for most of the morphemes in a
language. Consider words such as cranberry, loganberry, and boysenberry. The
berry part is no problem, but cran, logan and boysen occur only with berry. The
boysen- part of boysenberry was named for a man named Boysen who developed the
fruit as a hybrid from the blackberry and raspberry. But few people are aware
of this and it is a bound stem morpheme that only occurs in this word. Lukewarm
is another word with two stem morphemes, with luke occurring only in this word,
because it is not the same morpheme as the name Luke.
Bound
forms such as cran-, logan-, boysen-, and luke- require a redefinition of the
concept of morpheme. Some morphemes are not meaningful in isolation but acquire
meaning only in combination with other specific morphemes. Thus the morpheme
cran, when joined with berry, has the meaning of special kind of berry which is
small, red, and acidic; luke when combined with warm has the meaning ‘sort of’
or ‘somewhat’, and so on.
Just
a there are some morphemes which occur only in a single word (that is, combined
with another morpheme), there are other morphemes which occur in many words,
combining with different morphemes, but for which it is very difficult to find
a constant meaning. How would you define the –ceive in receive, preceive,
conceive, and conceive, or the –mit in remit, permit, commit, submit, transmit,
and admit ? The meaning of such morphemes depends on the entire word in which
they occur, on their morphological context.
There
are other words that seem to be composed
of prefix + stem morphemes in which the stems, like the cran- or –ceive,
never occur alone, but always with a regular prefix. Thus we find inept, but no
*ept, inane, but no *ane, incest, but no *cest, inert but no *ert, disgused,
but no *gused.
Similarly,
the stems of upholster, downhearted, and outlandish do not occur by themselves:
*holster and *heared (with these meanings), and *landish are not free
morphemes. In addition, *downholster, *upheared, and *inlandish, their
‘opposites’, are not found in any English lexicon.
To
complicate things a little further, there are words like strawberry in which
the straw has no relationship to any other kind of straw, gooseberry, which is
unrelated to goose, and blackbarry, which may be blue or red. While some of
these words may have historical origins, there is no present meaningful
connection. He Oxford English Dictionary entry for the word strawberry states
that :The reason for the name has been variously conjectured. One explanation
refers the first element to Straw... a particle of straw or chaff, a mote
describing the appearance of the achenes scattered over the surface of the
strawberry is not the same morpheme as that found in straw-like or
straw-coloured.
A
morpheme, like a word, is a linguistic sign its meaning must be constant. The
morpheme –er means ‘one who does’ in word such as singer, painter, lover, and
worker, but the same sounds represent the ‘comparative’ morpheme, meaning
‘more’, in nicer, prettier, and taller. Thus, two different morphemes may have
the same form, that is, may be pronounced identically but be two morphemes
because they have different meanings. The same sounds may occur in another word
and may not represent any separate morpheme as is shown by the final syllable
is butcher, -er, does not represent any morpheme, since a butcher is not one
who butches. (In an earlier form of English the word butcher was bucker, ‘one
who dresses buchs’. The –er in this word was then a sperate morpheme.)
Similarly, in water the –er is not a distinct morpheme ending; butcher and
water are single morphemes, or monomorphemic words. This follows from the
concept of the morpheme as a sound-meaning unit.
Non-affix
lexical content morphemes that cannot be analysed into smaller parts, such as
system, boy, or cran, are called root morphemes. When a root morpheme is
combined with affix morphemes it forms a stem. Other affixes can be added to a
stem to form a more conplex stem, as sohwn in the following :
Root
: Chomsky (‘proper’ noun) stem : Chomsky+ite (noun + suffix) word :
Chomsky+ite+s (noun+suffix+suffix)
Root
: believe (verb) stem : believe+able (verb+suffix) word : un+believe+able
(prefix+verb+suffix)
Root
: system (noun) stem : system+atic (noun+suffix) stem : un+system+atic
(prefix+noun+suffix) word :un+system+atic+al+ly
(prefix+noun+suffix+suffix+suffix)
As
one adds each additional affix to a stem, a new stem and a new word is formed.
All
morphemes are bound or free. Affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes) are
bound morphemes. Root morphemes can be bound or free, as illustrated by the
following :
Root
: Free (dog, cat, aardvark, cordury, run, bottle, hot, separate, phone museum,
school) Bound (logan+berry,
dis+gruntle,un+couth,non+chalance,per+ceive,in+ept,re+mit,in+cest,homo+geneous)
Affix
: friend+ship,
lead+ership,re+do,homo+geneous,hetero+geneous,trans+sex+ual,sad+ly,tall+ish,a+moral)
