This article attempts to highlight this difference through a description of the two terms. What is a Morpheme?Ī morpheme refers to the smallest meaningful element of a word. A morpheme cannot be further broken into parts. For example, chair, dog, bird, table, computer are all morphemes. As you can see they express a direct meaning yet cannot be further separated into smaller parts. However, a morpheme is not similar to a syllable as it carries a meaning. For example, when we say giraffe, it consists of a number of syllables but a single morpheme. Sometimes a single word can carry a number of morphemes. Let us try to understand this through an example. If we take the word ‘regained’, this word consists of 3 morphemes. " smallest unit of grammar that can stand alone as a complete utterance, separated by spaces in written language and potentially by pauses in speech.".David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. is divided into two major components, syntax and morphology. ![]() This division follows from the special status of the word as a basic linguistic unit, with syntax dealing with the combination of words to make sentences, and morphology with the form of words themselves." -R. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
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