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LECTURE 4
WORD-BUILDING

1. The morpheme and its types
2. Derivation
3. Conversion
4. Compounding
5. Shortening (Contraction)
6. Other Ways of Word Building

Key terms: morpheme, form, segmentable and non-
segmentable words, root, affix, stem, derived stem, compound
stem, derivation, conversion, compounding, shortening,
abbreviation, blending, onomatopoeia, reduplication, back-
formation.

1. The morpheme and its types
The word consists of morphemes. The term morpheme is
derived from Greek morphe (form) + -eme. The Greek suffix -eme
has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest significant or
distinctive unit. The morpheme may be defined as the smallest
meaningful unit which has a sound form and meaning, occurring in
speech only as a part of a word. In other words, a morpheme is an
association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But
unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech
only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a
word may consist of a single morpheme. Nor are they divisible
into smaller meaningful units. That is why the morpheme may also
be defined as the minimum double-facet (shape/meaning)
meaningful language unit that can be subdivided into phonemes
(the smallest singlefacet distinctive units of language with no
meaning of their own). So there are 3 lower levels of a language –
a phoneme, a morpheme, a word.

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