Grammatical morphemes
What is the difference in meaning between apple and apples? What is the difference in form? What does this tell you about these two words?
ecause words on the grammatical end of the lexical-grammatical continuum have such vague meanings, they do not contribute as much to the overall meaning of a sentence as nouns, verbs, and adjectives do. For this reason, they tend to get less emphasis from speakers. They tend to be short and to receive no stress. Over time, this may lead them to lose the character of words altogether and become "attached" in some sense to nouns, verbs, or adjectives. Here are a few English examples.
1. pencils
2. walked
3. unnecessarily
4. reconnecting
In each case there is a basic word on the lexical end of the continuum: pencil, walk, necessary, connect. In addition there are one or more elements attached to the beginnings or ends of these words to make longer, more complex words. These elements include -s, -ed, un-, -ly, re-, and -ing, where the hyphens indicate which side these elements attach to. In each case, these elements also contribute some meaning to the larger word. For example, in reconnecting, the re- indicates a repetition of the connecting. But in this section I'll have little more to say about the meanings of such elements. The focus for the moment is on their form.
In what sense are these elements not words? It turns out that "wordhood" is a matter of degree, like so many other concepts in linguistics. And like some other concepts, it is multi-dimensional; there are different criteria for being a word. First, a word should be pronounceable. In the most extreme cases, for example, -s in pencils (pronounced /z/) and -ed in walked (pronounced /t/), these elements that we're considering are not even legitimate English syllables. So on grounds of pronounceability, these make very bad words.
Second, a word should have a coherent form that does not depend much on its neighbors. In this sense the element that we write "ed" is not a good word because it is pronounced /t/ in words such as walked, /d/ in words such as lived, and /@d/ in words such as needed.
Third, a word should be relatively independent of the other words around it; that is, it should be possible to separate it from them with other words. In this sense -ed is not a good word since there is normally nothing that can separate it from the verb it follows; we can't say things like walk away ed or walk alone ed. By the same token, re- does not make a good word since it cannot be separated from the verb it precedes; it is impossible to say things like re carefully connect or re don't connect.
Since forms like -s, -ed, and re- are not words, we need another name for them. Each of these forms has a meaning (though as we'll see later in this chapter, the meaning may be so abstract that it is difficult to describe), and it can't be further subdivided into smaller pieces that have meaning. Such a unit is called a morpheme. Note that by this definition a full-fledged word like cat is also a morpheme because it has a meaning and cannot be broken into smaller meaningful units.
Morphemes near the lexical end of the lexical-grammatical continuum are called lexical morphemes; morphemes such as the, -s, and re- near the grammatical end of the continuum are called grammatical morphemes. Note that grammatical morphemes include forms that we can consider to be words like the, a, and, and of and others that make up parts of words like -s, -ed, un-, and re-.
In a word consisting of more than one morpheme, there is normally at least one lexical morpheme. Thus the word walking consists of two morphemes, a lexical morpheme, walk, and a grammatical morpheme, -ing. The word cropduster consists of three morphemes, two lexical morphemes, crop and dust, and a grammatical morpheme, -er. In this section we'll only be looking at words with a single lexical morpheme and one more grammatical morphemes. In these cases we'll call the lexical morpheme the root of the word. So in the word walking, the root is walk, and in the word carefully, the root is care.
grammtical and lexical morphemes*
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