词汇学Lesson 5.pptVIP

Morpheme The word morpheme is derived from the Greek word morphe meaning “form”. It is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. Therefore, a morpheme is the minimal linguistic unit that cannot be further analyzed, nor can it be divided into smaller meaningful parts without violation of the original meaning. It can be a word or part of a word which has meaning. Types of Morphemes Free and bound morphemes Free morphemes may occur alone, that is, they may constitute words by themselves, such as interest, close; bound morphemes cannot be used by themselves, but must be combined with other morphemes to form words, such as interesting, disclose. Roots The central morpheme in a word is often a free morpheme and is called the root. The peripheral morphemes that are attached to the root are always bound morphemes and are called affixes. Some roots may stand alone as words, such as moon, girl. These roots are free roots. It is the free roots that provide the English language with a basis for the formation of new words. Many bound roots in English derived from foreign languages, especially from Greek and Latin. For example, tain in words like contain, retain, and ceive in receive, deceive. In modern English, they are not words, and so are not free morphemes. They cannot stand alone as words. Lesson 5 The formation of English words Types of Morphemes Content and functional morphemes Content morphemes are those morphemes that carry meaning, while functional morphemes signal the relations among words, they are heavily tied to a grammatical function, expressing syntactic relationships between units in a sentence, or categories such as number or tense. Generally speaking, content morphemes are verbs, nouns and adjectives like sand, eat and green. By contrast, prepositions (to, by), articles (the, a) and conjunctions (and, or) are typically functional morphemes. affixes An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a root to form a word. They are bound morpheme by definiti