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LECTURE 3
                                                     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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