Morphemes and Graphemes

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GRAPHEMES AND MORPHEMES YourFirstName YourLastName Course Title November 20, 2014 Morpheme and Graphemes Name: Institution: Course: Date: Introduction Graphemes are the smallest units in a writing system capable of causing a contrast in meaning [1]. Graphemes comprise of the alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, punctuation marks and typographic ligatures and other individual symbols [2]. Morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language [3]. There are about 40 distinctive phonemes in English, but 70 letters or letter combinations to symbolize phonemes. This makes pronouncing spellings easier than writing correct spellings [1]. A morpheme can be either an element of a word or a word; this is to say that morphemes are composed of graphemes. For instance, the word “technique” is both a morpheme and a word. Morphemes can be broken into smaller parts and they do not lose all semantic meaning. A big question to ponder is whether the brain handles speech and writing identically or not. Both writing and speaking are controlled by the brain but when someone is speaking, they do not separate each word with a pause as it is in the case of written words. Despite of that the brain recognizes each word individually. For instance, it is hard to isolate the components of a language that you do not know when it is spoken. Speech uses voices like pitch, rhythm and stress to communicate their message while written words depend on the words and punctuation to bring meaning. The differences that exist between speaking and writing may affect the learning of a language. Grapheme may signal parts of a word or whole words. Numeral grapheme like <1>, <2>, <3> is spoken words that varies from one language to another. Thus grapheme represents the abstract nature of a language. The English alphabet has several letters whose

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