LIN200H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Grammatical Gender, Part Of Speech, Infinitive
Document Summary
Is the study of words and parts of words- the underlying rules behind the structure of words. Not all languages have the same morphological rules. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a word. The form of a word, its suffixes and prefixes, help us determine the syntactic category ( set of words that share a significant number of grammatical characteristics- ex. A morpheme is not the same as a syllable, mississippi has more than one syllable but only one morpheme. Words can be monomorphemic (one morpheme) or polymorphemic (more than one morpheme: example: racehorse is p. m. and catapult is m. p. since catapult is not related to the feline (cat) A word is a a morpheme or combination of morpheme to which we attach meaning . Morphemes are either bound (must be attached to another morpheme- trans and mit) or free (can stand alone as a word- cat and drink)
