Crossword clues for morpheme
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
morpheme \mor"pheme\ (m[^o]r"f[=e]m), n. (Linguistics) The smallest unit of meaning of a language, which cannot be divided into smaller parts carrying meaning; it is usually smaller than a single wordform, such as the -ed morpheme of verbs in the past tense or the -s morpheme of nouns in the plural form.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"smallest meaningful unit in a language," 1896, from German morpheme, coined 1895 by Polish-born linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), from Greek morphe "form, shape" (see Morpheus), on analogy of phonème.
Wiktionary
n. (context linguistic morphology English) A smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning, such as "un-", "break", and "-able" in the word "unbreakable".
WordNet
n. minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units
Wikipedia
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. When it stands by itself, it is considered a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural). Every word comprises one or more morphemes.
Usage examples of "morpheme".
The normal morpheme, in their language as in ours, consists of a sequence of phonemes.
I do not know whether there are more morphemes in the language of Priest-Kings or in English, but both are apparently rich languages, and, of course, the strict morpheme count is not necessarily a reliable index to the complexity of the lexicon, because of combinations of morphemes wo form new words.
German, for example, tends to rely somewhat more on morpheme combination than does English or French.
On the other hand it may well be the case that, as a matter of fact, the morpheme set of the language of Priest-Kings is indeed larger than that of English.
Remember that Elvish always indicates pluralization by adding a semi-independent morpheme, and that this semi-independence is reflected in the various syntax-bearing enclitics.
Her staff was very good at taking the product of a computer, which would simply substitute rough morpheme equivalents in bundles, with various feature and intonation markings attached, and turning these chunks of raw language into suitable vehicles for communication.
Syntactic programs ranging from the deeply esoteric to the plain silly had been employed, but they had not come close to cracking one word or a hint of a morpheme, of what was now being called The Gabble.
They still struggled with ungainly programs weighed down by endless morpheme lists that supposedly would someday generate any message in a given language.
Every phoneme was formed of two or three superposed sounds, and every morpheme was a blend of phonemes, flowing together like water.
The morphemes of the language of Priest-Kings, those smallest intelligible information bits, in particular roots and affixes, are, of course, like the morphemes of English, extremely numerous.
I was told, incidentally, that the language of the Priest-Kings does possess more morphemes than English but I do not know if the report is truthful or not, for Priest-Kings tend to be somewhat touchy on the matter of any comparisons, particularly those to their disadvantage or putative disadvantage, with organisms of what they regard as the lower orders.
The translator tapes, incidentally, are approximately the same size, but this is no help, since the tapes represent pairings of approximate equivelants, and there are several English morphemes not translatable into the language of Priest-Kings, and, as I learned, morphemes in their language for which no English equivelants exist.
He was able to manipulate a cilia board well enough to reproduce a few basic commands, and when Voth absentmindedly pressed a limb against his skin, he was often able to recognize some of the simpler morphemes, like numbers.
The AI had analyzed the morphemes it identified in their speech, and assigned probable meaning to the combinations.
When he connected me to the modem, his goal was to supplement my technical knowledge of speech -- phonemes, morphemes, syntax, lexicon, prosody, discourse -- with a broad-based knowledge of semantics.