morpheme
Noun
Meaning
minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units
Source: WordNetSynonyms
Antonyms
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Hyponyms
Phrases with the word
Examples
An example of this is that the English plural morpheme is written -s regardless of whether it is pronounced as /s/ or /z/ ; we write cats and dogs, not dogz.
An example of a morphophonological alternation in English is provided by the plural morpheme, written as "-s" or "-es".
For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself.
Chomsky & Halle 1968:54 In these cases, a given morpheme (i.e. a component of a word) has a fixed spelling even though it is pronounced differently in different words.
A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language.
A morphophoneme within a morpheme can be expressed in different ways in different allomorphs of that morpheme (according to morphophonological rules).