Morphemes

You may remember being taught back in English class that certain prefixes or suffixes provide a clue for the type and meaning of a word. For example, your teacher may have told you that if a word ends in “ly,” it indicates that it is likely an adjective, such as “quickly,” “lovingly,” or “kindly.” Or, if you see the suffix “ise” attached to a base word, like in the case of “advertise” or “revise,” you’re probably dealing with a verb (or a “doing” word, as many teachers call it to help us correctly identify the word category). 

These prefixes and suffixes are also known as morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in language. You can imagine them as the Lego blocks of language, which, when added to one another, change the meaning of a word. Sometimes, morphemes can be standalone words like “couch” or “flower.” Other times, they are bound morphemes, such as prefixes and suffixes, that are attached to a base word, such as “re” in “recycle” or “s” in “dogs.” They are morphemes because adding them transforms the meaning in the word— “re” indicates something is repeating or anew, and “s” changes base words to plural.¹ 

Morphemes are important because they help us to decode the meaning of a word unconsciously, allowing us to apprehend unfamiliar terms as we learn language. Let’s pretend you didn’t know the meaning of the word “unbelievable.” By breaking it down into the smallest units of meaning—morphemes—you’d be able to guess its meaning. When broken down into morphemes, we get: un + believe + able.

• Un = a bound morpheme that indicates the negation “not”
• Believe = a free morpheme that means to accept something as true
• Able = a bound morpheme that means “being capable”

By putting these morphemes together, you’d understand that the meaning of the word unbelievable is “not capable of being believed.” In this way, morphemes act as a mental shortcut, allowing our brains to quickly and unconsciously interpret words based on familiar patterns. Whether we’re reading, writing, or speaking, morphemes play a foundational role in how we construct and understand language.

Linguistics: A field focused on the scientific study of language and its structure. Linguistics explores how various components of words, such as morphemes and phrases, contribute to meaning. There are various sub-branches of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, which examines the relationship between society and language, or psycholinguistics, which explores how language impacts psychological processes.

Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a language. For example, the word cat is made up of phonemes /k/, /æ/, and /t/. 

Lexeme: A unit of meaning in a language, made up of morphemes, which represents a core concept for a set of words. For example, the words “write,” “writing,” and “wrote” are all different forms of the lexeme “write.”

Free Morpheme: A morpheme that can exist independently. For example, standalone words like “curtain” or “kind” are free morphemes. These are also sometimes called base words.¹

Bound Morpheme: A morpheme added to a base word to alter its meaning, sometimes taking the form of a prefix or suffix. Alternatively, it may be a root base, such as the Greek base “logy,” which means “the study of,” like in the word biology, made up of morphemes “bio” and “logy.”¹ 

Prefix: A morpheme added to the start of a base word to alter its meaning. For example, the prefix “semi” is added to a base word to indicate half, like in “semi-sweet.”

Suffix: A morpheme added to the end of a base word to change its meaning. For example, the suffix “ness” is added to a word to indicate that it is a noun, such as for the word “happiness.” 

Inflectional Morpheme: A bound morpheme that assigns a grammatical property to the word, such as tense, number, or comparison, but does not change the essential meaning of the word. For example, the inflectional morpheme “ing” can be added to a verb to indicate present tense, like in the word “running.”³ 

Derivational Morpheme: A bound morpheme that usually changes the grammatical category of a word. For example, adding the derivational morpheme “ful” to a noun like “beauty” changes it to the adjective “beautiful.”³

In 1873, French linguist Antoni Dufriche-Desgenettes introduced the term “phoneme,” which described the smallest units of sound that make up a word, with the goal of introducing terminology to allow for the scientific study of language.⁴ For Dufriche-Desgenettes, the term phoneme was a more concise way to describe and compare the sounds of language. However, a few years later, Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay further developed the idea of phonemes to suggest that instead of simply being sounds, they were mental categories people relied on to distinguish meaning. 

At the same time, Baudouin de Courtenay coined the term morpheme to describe “that part of a word which is endowed with psychological autonomy and is for the very same reasons not further divisible.” Baudouin de Courtenay believed it was important to distinguish between the sound systems, made up of individual phonemes, that contribute to meaning and meaning systems that contribute to our overall comprehension of language. The distinction provided linguists with a more systematic way to study word creation, language evolution, and grammatical patterns. Although phonemes were imbued with meaning, morphemes exist precisely because they are the mental representations and can be made up of multiple phonemes.⁵ 

During this time in the early 20th century, the field of structural linguistics was becoming more popular thanks to the publication of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Saussure emphasized language as a system of signs, where meaning comes from the relationships between elements like phonemes and morphemes.⁶ 

It wasn’t until the 1920s and 30s that the term morpheme became well-established in mainstream linguistics, when American linguist Leonard Bloomfield further developed the concept and solidified morphemes as a basic unit of morphological analysis within a structuralist framework. Opposing Baudouin de Courtenay’s view that morphemes were abstract mental representations of meaning, Bloomfield argued that they were empirical and observable. He believed that morphemes combined form (how it looks in written text or sounds in spoken speech) and meaning. He also emphasized that words that may look the same and be composed of the same phonemes but not be the same morpheme, such as “bear,” which can either mean an animal or to endure. 

Another important distinction in Bloomfield’s theory of morphemes was that morphemes had to be recurring and independently carry meaning. For example, the word “cats” could be split into the morphemes “cat” and “s,” because both recur in various forms and both carry meaning, with “cat” representing an animal and “s” denoting plurality. This, however, meant that irregular forms of words, such as “geese,” were just one morpheme, even though it is the plural form of “goose,” because you cannot isolate the form of the plural marker. This led to him later introducing the concept of secondary morpheme-words to categorize these irregular forms.⁵ Later, other linguists would categorize these irregular variants as allomorphs: different forms of the same underlying morpheme.⁷ 

Since the 20th century, due to recognition that many meaningful morphological units, just like “geese,” are not easily segmented, modern linguists have reverted to treating morphemes as abstract grammatical units that underlie forms, similar to Baudouin de Courtenay’s initial definition.8Today, morphemes remain an important focus of study in linguistics, but also in other fields like cognitive science when exploring language acquisition, and in natural language processing, where understanding the structure of words is key to building smarter technologies.

Antoni Dufriche-Desgenettes

A 19th-century French linguist who, driven by a desire to scientifically study language, coined the term phoneme to describe a speech sound. Coining the term allowed linguists to more easily discuss sounds in language. Dufriche-Desgenettes developed his interest in language due to being a frequent traveler, which allowed him to collect information on the sounds of various diverse languages.⁹ 

Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay

A Polish structural linguist who coined the term morpheme to distinguish sound systems and meaning systems in language. He defined morphemes as indivisible units of words that are mental representations of meaning.⁵ Baudouin de Courtenay also evolved Dufriche-Desgenettes’s term phonemes by suggesting that instead of merely representing sounds, phonemes also carried meaning. Baudouin de Courtenay was also interested in comparative linguistics, exploring how linguistic structure affected world outlook. 

Ferdinand de Saussure

A Swiss linguist whose ideas on the importance of structure in language, outlined in his book Course in General Linguistics, helped to popularize the field of structural linguistics and emphasized the scientific approach to linguistics. De Saussure was a passionate proponent that language had to be viewed as a social phenomenon, and its study must consider how it exists in relation to its time period as well as how it evolves over time.¹⁰

Leonard Bloomfield

An American linguist who popularized the concept of morphemes in the 1920s and 30s. He is also well known for his book Language, which was foundational in the subsequent treatment of linguistics as a science in the 20th century.¹¹ The book provided a systematic and detailed approach to linguistics, which informed literacy education practices and provided a great deal of knowledge on the structure of languages.¹²

Understanding morphemes doesn’t just help linguists analyze word structure—it has practical implications for fields like education, science, and even historical linguistics. By breaking language down into its smallest meaning-bearing parts, we can uncover how people learn, how languages are related, and how to make complex ideas easier to understand.

The significance of morphemes in linguistic history

Understanding the structure of languages through the analysis of components such as morphemes provides valuable insight into the history of language, as linguists can see how languages have evolved over time. For example, by comparing morphemes in different languages, linguists can identify which languages have historically come into contact with one another or which ones must have evolved from the same root language.¹³

In the 2000s, American linguist Edward Vajda developed a hypothesis, through the comparison of morphemes and other structural components, that Na-Dene languages, Indigenous languages spoken in North America, showed parallels with Yeniseian languages spoken in Siberia. Vadja found over 100 morphemes between Na-Dene and Yeniseian languages that shared a common origin, suggesting that speakers of these two groups of languages may have once been a part of the same linguistic community, with people migrating from Siberia to North America.¹⁴ 

Supporting children with reading

Awareness of the morphemes that make up a language is an essential part of learning how to read and can especially help with children who struggle with phonemic awareness, the ability to hear variation between sounds. Children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia often struggle with phonemic awareness, making morpheme awareness an important skill to overcome their challenges. Memory is also often weaker for children with learning disabilities, and as words and phrases are made up of more phonemes, the smallest units of sound, than morphemes, it can become a struggle to hold them in their working memory while trying to decode or spell a word.¹⁵

As morphemes carry meaning, even if children struggle to decode the phonemes, they can still infer meaning without reading every sound correctly. Morphemes also appear consistently across words, supporting recognition and learning and allowing people to understand the meaning of a word even when it is not familiar. There are many reading interventions that use morphological strategies, such as the Orton-Gillingham approach, which emphasizes the teaching of rules and patterns of the English language, starting with smaller units and building up to more complex word structures.¹⁶ 

Helping to decode scientific terms

Scientific words can be especially tricky—in fact, sometimes it’s like reading a whole different language! However, morphemes can prove to be a great tool for understanding scientific language. Instead of having to learn and memorize each individual term, children can focus on memorizing a smaller number of morphemes to ease comprehension. 

For example, imagine a child reading the word “thermodynamics” in a science textbook for the first time. That sounds awfully daunting, but if we break it down into the morphemes “thermo” and “dynamics,” it is easier to understand what it means. Thermo means heat, while dynamics means force and motion. By putting these together, you can decode that “thermodynamics” is the study of heat and motion. 

Additionally, morpheme awareness can also provide clues as to a biological relatedness between animal or plant names. If we think of the Latin term Canis lupus, which refers to a wolf, and the term Canis familiaris, which means dog, then it is likely that the two animals that share morphemes also come from the same family.¹⁷ 

Although morphemes are often described as the building blocks of language, their role, structure, and even definition have sparked ongoing debate among linguists. From questions about whether we’re born with the ability to understand them, to whether all morphemes actually carry meaning, the concept remains far from universally agreed upon.

Is morpheme awareness innate?

Language is seemingly what differentiates us humans from other animals, and with the exception of a very small percentage of people, almost all humans end up acquiring language. This begs the question of whether language acquisition and our ability to acquire linguistic units like morphemes is innate or acquired as our cognitive capabilities develop.

Noam Chomsky is best known for being on the innate side of the debate. The American linguist believes that humans are born with a kind of language acquisition device that allows us to learn “Universal Grammar,” which he defines as the principles of language, including phonemes, morphemes, and grammar. This innate ability allows children to learn whichever language they are exposed to. Supporting his argument is the fact that children often do not follow a structured approach to learning language; they simply are exposed to it from their parents and end up being able to learn morphemes and apply them to words they’ve never heard before.¹⁸

On the other side of the debate, American psychologist B.F. Skinner argued for the language acquisition theory. He believed that children acquire language through operant conditioning. By being rewarded for producing the correct utterances, such as getting a smile from their parent when they say “food,” and subsequently being given food, they acquire language through positive reinforcement. 

However, the rapid pace at which children learn new words and grammatical structures like morphemes isn’t aligned with Skinner’s theory. The fact that children can often apply morphemes to unfamiliar words (as you’ll later learn about with the Wug Test) also contradicts this explanation.¹⁹ 

Are morphemes universal?

Most people agree that morpheme-based word formation is a universal feature of language, with similar structures found in most languages. Most languages have morphemes in the form of roots, prefixes, or affixes, which, when added to a base morpheme, change the meaning of the word. Even if the letters or sounds that make up the morpheme are different, there are similarities. For example, in English, the affix morpheme “s” is added to make a plural (in most cases). In German, the affixes “e” and “er” are most common for turning a word into its plural form.²⁰ 

In most languages, each word is composed of just a few morphemes. However, a very small number of languages show a very different form of typology. Polysynthetic languages, including Indigenous languages of Central and South America—Yucatec and Oneida—have very high morpheme-per-word ratios, challenging the notion that morpheme structures are universal. A singular word, when translated, can be an entire sentence in English. For example, the word “a-ban-yawoyʔ-wargaʔ-maɳe-gaɲ-giɲe-ŋ” from a polysynthetic language means “I cooked the wrong meat for them again.”²¹

As linguists traditionally define a morpheme as a recurrent, segmentable unit of meaning, it assumes that you can easily separate morphemes and match each individual one to a specific meaning. In polysynthetic languages, the tight fusing of morphemes and the high morpheme-per-word ratio challenge our ability to identify distinct units and cast doubt on whether our definition of a morpheme is truly universal. 

Do all morphemes hold meaning?

By definition, morphemes are supposed to be the smallest units of meaning that are repeated within language. For bound morphemes, this definition holds true. The morpheme “ed” is seen in many words and usually indicates past tense, while the morpheme “ly” turns a noun into an adjective. 
However, many irregular word forms are considered free morphemes. For example, “sheep” can be plural, though it lacks the common plural morpheme “s” and is not replicated. Critics point to these irregular words as zero markers and define them as grammatical marks that do not have an audible form. More context is needed to give the morpheme meaning. You would need other units of meaning, such as the word “many,” to know that it was plural. These invisible morphemes call into question whether the definition of a morpheme as the smallest unit of meaning is an accurate one.²²

Revitalizing the Hawaiian language 

After the Hawaiian Kingdom was colonized by the United States in 1893, English was enforced in schools and government, causing the Hawaiian language to be used less and less frequently. By the mid-20th century, Hawaiian was considered critically endangered, soon to become extinct. Thankfully, young professor Larry Kimura recognized that the language held a diverse and rich history and culture. He began a 90-minute radio program called Ka Leo Hawai’i, where he interviewed around 2,000 native language speakers. The radio show became very popular and sparked a movement to revitalize the Hawaiian language.²³

The understanding and documentation of morphemes was an important aspect of the language revitalization project, especially as most of the people who were able to speak Hawaiian fluently were from an older generation whose numbers were quickly dwindling. Teaching morphemes helps speakers decode and build vocabulary efficiently. Additionally, it supports the long-term survival of a language. Instead of needing to identify and record every single word, taking a morphological approach reduces the work and allows people to show how roots and affixes relate to one another, meaning that even in the absence of a native speaker, people can decode the meaning of unfamiliar terms.²⁴ For example, the prefix “aka” means carefully or slowly. If someone saw the word “aka-ai” and knew that “ai” meant to eat, they would be able to deduce that the word means “to eat slowly.” ²⁵

The Wug Test & innate language acquisition

Within linguistics, it is often debated whether we are born with the ability to acquire language or if it is something that develops over time as we are exposed to language and are taught how to read, spell, and write. In the 1950s, psycholinguists (I bet you can infer the focus of their research by understanding the morphemes “psycho” and “linguist") Roger Brown and Jean Berko Gleason conducted a study that supported the idea that we are born with an innate ability to learn language.²⁶

Brown and Gleason developed “The Wug Test” to try and see whether children simply memorize words or whether they are able to decode the meaning of unfamiliar words. This would suggest they are learning rules that haven’t been explicitly taught to them, implying that people are born with the ability to decode words and acquire new language. Brown and Gleason presented kids in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade with made-up words and asked them to apply basic grammar. For example, the kids were shown a picture of a bird-like figure and told, “This is a wug.” The children would then be shown a card with two bird-like figures and asked what the plural would be. Over 75% of the children would correctly apply morphemes to these made-up words by identifying that two bird-like figures would be “wugs.” ²⁶

What was especially interesting was that the children learned morphemes in roughly the same order, regardless of their different family backgrounds and varied amounts of language exposure. For example, most children knew the morpheme “s” meant plural, but it was mostly the five-to-seven-year-olds who understood more complex morphemes like “ed.” This consistency suggests that children may be biologically predisposed to acquire the building blocks of language in a particular order, regardless of their environment or upbringing.²⁷

Language Acquisition

While learning our first language likely seemed to have happen unconsciously, if we consider that when we are born, we know zero words, but by age five, we know approximately 2,500, it is quite an impressive feat. Breaking down words into smaller meaningful units, such as phonemes and morphemes, makes language acquisition more efficient. Check out this article to learn more about the process of acquiring language and the important role it plays in all of our lives. 

The Whorf Hypothesis

Have you ever wondered whether the language you use impacts the way that you perceive the world? The Whorf Hypothesis suggests that language has a big part to play in influencing the thoughts you have, or even are able to have. It can cause speakers of different languages to have widely varied perceptions of the world and can even influence the decisions they make. Read this article to learn more about the Whorf Hypothesis and an interesting look at how the differences between German and English may be responsible for making Germans more future-focused. 

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