How do you count morphemes in a word?
Linguists, or those who study language have devised a category for the smallest unit of grammar: morphemes. Morphemes function as the foundation of language and syntax. Syntax is the arrangement of words and sentences to create meaning.
Morphemes function as the foundation of language and syntax. Syntax is the arrangement of words and sentences to create meaning. In linguistics, we would further classify morphemes as either as phonemes (the smallest units of grammar recognizable by sound) or graphemes (the smallest units of written language).
The bird-like man hardly touched his food at dinner. There are a total of twelve morphemes, and ten of the twelve are free: The other two morphemes, -ed and -ly, are types of affixes, which brings us to our next topic. An affix is a bound morpheme, which means that it is exclusively attached to a free morpheme for meaning.
Exercise: Identifying Morphemes. Count the number of morphemes in each word. Underline the bound morphemes. Example: unpresentable — 3 morphemes; un- and –able are bound morphemes. 1. alligator 2. calmly 3. running 4. blindness 5. stapler 6. bargain 7. regrouping 8. undeniable 9. assertion 10.
How many morphemes are in the word feet?
A “morpheme” is a short segment of language that meets three basic criteria:
two
If two free morphemes are joined together they create a compound word. These words are a great way to introduce morphology (the study of word parts) into the classroom.
A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaningful language. “Girl” is a morpheme, as is “skip.” “Girlfriend” has two morphemes, as does “skipper”. Some morphemes can be free (as in girl, skip, and type) whereas other morphemes are bound (as in huck, funct, and ept).
Taking each utterance in turn, we count the number of morphemes in the utterances. So, we would analyse the utterances as follows. example, in the word dis-interest-ed, dis- is a prefix, -interest- is a root, and -ed is a suffix: these are all morphemes. There is, therefore, a total of 17 morphemes.
