The Differences Between a Word and a Morpheme

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The essence of this analytical literary composition is to find out what the differences and similarities between a word and a morpheme. In the English language, words are made up of different units. These components can be put together to come up with words. The branch of linguistics that deals with the study of word structures especially in terms of morphemes is called Morphology. Morphology as a branch of linguistics aims at describing the structures of words and the patterns of word formation (Klammer, 2007). Thus hence before looking at the differences and the similarities of the two elements, it is vital to look at a word and a morpheme in greater detail A morpheme is a smallest unit of a word. This unit should be a meaningful one. According to Donald (1999), a morpheme is a grammatical unit in which there is an arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning that cannot be analyzed further. A morpheme being the smallest unit, a morpheme cannot be cut into smaller parts and still retain meaning. It cannot be analyzed further at this point. If morphemes are to serve the purpose for which they are intended, they must have certain specific properties. It must be possible for any given word to divide its meaning into some small number of sub parts, divide its form into a corresponding number of continuous sub strings of phonetic material and the part of form. It must also establish a correspondence between the parts of meaning. (Donald, 1999) At this stage it is important to reckon that even though a morpheme is not a word, it is an element of a word. Every word in every language is made up of two or more morphemes. At the same time a single word may be composed of one morpheme. (Donald, 1999) Morphemes are stored in the brain. They are combined or transformed through different morphological processes. The outcomes of these morphological processes are words. These

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