Morpheme

Definitions

The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.

Equivalents

Examples

“Just as a regiment is ultimately made up of soldiers, so the sentence is of morphemes—they are its ultimate constituents.”

“There is therefore a natural tendency in both American and European structural linguistics to insist that the word should be syntactically decomposed. For writers such as Hockett (1958), or for that matter⟳ the early Chomsky (1957), the indivisible unit of grammar was the morpheme, and the relationship of morpheme to morpheme within the word […] was to be handled no differently from that of word to word in any larger structure⟳.”

CEFR level