Re: Heyas all!

Trace Erin Kern wrote:
> >A morpheme is a meaning unit (I think that's a good simple
> >explanation, anybody else?).
>
> For example:
> Goh' = Light
> Noh' = Dark
>
> That what you mean?
Those are morphemes.  However, morpheme doesn't just mean word.  In
fact, words are often multiple morphemes.  A morpheme is like an
element, to use an analogy.  It can't be broken down into simpler
units.  For example, take the word "cats", this has two morphemes,
"cat", meaning "small feline", and "-s", meaning "plural", just as water
has two elements, hydrogen and oxygen.  Morphemes may be free, like
"cat", meaning that they can occur by themselves, or bound, like "-s",
meaning that they can only occur with other morphemes.  They may be
lexical, like "cat", meaning that they are words, in essence,
grammatical, like "-s", or derivational, like "un-".

--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files
http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-name: NikTailor