The Morpheme

Morphology is the study of morphemes. A morpheme can be defined briefly as a meaningful unit of language. There are two parts to this definition: a morpheme is a unit, and it is meaningful. As a unit of language, a morpheme typically has a sound associated with it, whether or not that sound forms a whole word.

Consider the word caps. It contains two morphemes: the lexical item cap and the plural suffix -s, which attaches to the end of the word. Morphemes take many different forms across languages, and a general cover term for them is the affix. An affix is any grammatical element that attaches to a word, whether at the beginning, the middle, or the end.

The central question morphologists ask concerns the status of these units. As David Embick frames it in his book The Morpheme, a grammar consists of a set of primitive elements together with rules for building complex objects out of them. On his view the primitive elements are morphemes, and the system that combines them into complex structures is the syntax. His guiding question, in his words, is: "What is the nature of the primitive units of derivations?" (Grasso, citing Embick). That is, what is the nature of the morpheme, and how do morphemes relate to syntactic, semantic, and phonological information?

Between semantics and syntax

The morpheme is the basic primitive unit of language. It is meaningful, carrying semantic content, and it is organized in a certain way, an organization that belongs to syntax. The morpheme therefore occupies a middle ground between semantics and syntax: individual units that carry meaning, which the syntax then takes up and arranges into larger structures.

Morphology for semantics

Morphology can be approached from several angles. It often has a phonological component, since morphemes have a certain sound or character to them, and one could dwell entirely on the range of forms morphemes take across languages. Phonology, the study of sound systems and how sounds interact in a language, is genuinely important and sometimes affects meaning. But because the deeper goal is to determine what words mean, semantics takes priority. The orientation here is thus morphology in the service of semantics.

A single example sentence serves to illustrate the concepts throughout: the dermatologist hugged a pretty girl who was well read in the latest journal articles on the breeding of oxen. The sentence is deliberately odd, yet it is perfectly intelligible, and its various words and parts supply concrete cases for analysis. The broad picture is that morphemes are the essential building blocks needed to understand language: knowing what they mean and how they combine is what allows meaning to be built up compositionally from words into phrases, clauses, and whole discourses.