Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

“A minimal unit of grammar into which a sentence or a word can be divided. E.g., come inside can be divided into the minimal units come, in- and –side; distasteful into dis-, taste, and –ful.

The term was introduced, originally in French, in the late 19^th century, and its use in English reflects in part successive technical definitions from the 1930s and 1940s especially. Thus, in detail: 1. A “morpheme” was at first a unit within a word which has grammatical as opposed to lexical meaning; originally opposed in that sense to a “semanteme.” For Martinet, in the 1960s, it was thus one type of moneme. 2. In Bloomfield’s definition a morpheme is a form with either a grammatical or lexical meaning. It was thus one element in a minimal linguistic sign: e.g. the morphem dis in distasteful as linked to a meaning “not” or “negative.” It is on this use athe “moneme” was later modelled. 3. As defined by Charles F. Hockett and other Post-Bloomfieldians, it was an abstract unit at a grammatical level of representation realized by a form, or two or more alternative terms, at the level of pholology. These are its allomorphs, e.g. the [dis] of distasteful might be seen as one allomorph of a “negative” morpheme, of which another would be the [un] of unpleasant.

Sense 1 is effectively obsolete in English-speaking countries, where sense two tends to be more normal.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.