‘They
gave it me,’ Humpty Dumpty continued, ‘for an un-birthday present.’ ‘i beg your
pardon ?’ Alice said with a puzzled air. ‘I’m not offended,’ said Humpty
Dumpty. ‘I mean, what is an un-birthday present ?’ ‘A present given when it
isn't your birthday, of course.’ (Lewis Carroll, Through the looking-Glass)
When
Samuel Goldwyn, the pioneer moviemaker, announced: ‘In two words: impossible’,
he was reflecting the common view that words are the basic meaningful elements
in a language. We have already seen that this cannot be so, since some words
are formed by combining a number of distinct units of meaning. The traditional
term for the most element unit of grammatical form is morpheme. The word is
derived from the Greek word, morphe, meaning ‘form’. Linguistically speaking,
then Goldwyn should have said: ‘In two morphemes: im-possible’. A single word
may be composed of one or more morphemes :
One
morpheme : boy,desire
Two
morphemes : boy+ish,desire+able
Three
morphemes : boy+ish+ness, desire+able+ity
Four
morphemes : un+desire+able+ity, gentle+man+li+ness
More
than four morphemes : anti +dis+establish+ment+ari+nan+ism
A morpheme may be represented by a single
sound, such as the morpheme a- meaning ‘without’ as in amoral or asexual, or by
a single syllable, such as child and ish in child+ish. A morpheme, however, may
be represented by more than one syllable: by two syllables, as in aardvark,
lady, water; or by three syllables, as in Cloncurry or crocodile; or by four or
more syllable, as in salamander. Although we haven’t yet given a definition for
the term syllable, most speakers of English know intuitively how many syllables
there are in a morpheme or a word.
