Hyphenation for 'morpheme'

Showing how to split the syllables of 'morpheme'.

Syllabification or syllabication is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written. The written separation is usually marked by a hyphen when using English orthography (e.g., syl-la-ble) and with a period when transcribing in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For presentation purposes, typographers may use an interpunct, or a special-purpose "hyphenation point".

At the end of a line, a word is separated in writing into parts conventionally called "syllables" if it does not fit and if moving it to the next line would make the first line much shorter than the others. This can be a particular problem with very long words. Word processing has automated the process of justification, making syllabification of shorter words often superfluous.

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression, especially within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, inside a word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as cat inside the word cats), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes, may be added before or after the root, like the -s in cats, which indicates plurality but is always bound to a root noun and is not regarded as a word on its own. However, in some languages, including English and Latin, even many roots cannot stand alone; i.e., they are bound morphemes. For instance, the Latin root reg- ('king') must always be suffixed with a case marker: regis, regi, rex (reg+s), etc. The same is true of the English root nat(e) — ultimately inherited from a Latin root meaning "birth, born" — which appears in words like native, nation, nature, innate, and neonate. These sample English words have the following morphological analyses:"Unbreakable" is composed of three morphemes: un- (a bound morpheme signifying negation), break (a verb that is the root of unbreakable: a free morpheme), and -able (a bound morpheme as an adjective suffix signifying "capable of, fit for, or worthy of"). The plural morpheme for regular nouns (-s) has three allomorphs: it is pronounced /s/ (e.g., in cats ), /ɪz/ or /əz/ (e.g., in dishes ), and /z/ (e.g., in dogs ), depending on the pronunciation of the root.

Description above from the Wikipedia article "morpheme", licenced under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

English
- German (Deutsch)

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