But in most cases, the headword is considered as the base form of the word, from which all the other related word forms may be derived.
For example, speak is the lexeme, the base form; while speaks, spoke, speaking and spoken are all derived forms. The forms speaking, speak, speaks, spoke and spoken are different realizations of the lexeme speak. They all share a core meaning although they are spelled and pronounced differently.
A morpheme may also be a word form such as an affix (e.g. -able, in-, -hood); or it may be a combining form (e.g. bio-, geo-, pre-).
A word may be composed of one or more morphemes.
The morpheme may have ceased to be recognizable because of linguistic change, as in the case of –ow in window (related to ‘eye’) or the -fer in refer (from Latin ferre, ‘carry’).
Morphs which are different representations of the same morpheme are referred to as allomorphs of that morpheme. For example:
a context vs. an index, a battle vs. an apple
The limiting case for complex words is that of zero modification or conversion as in answer, call and question, which may be either nouns or verbs.
Compound words are formed by combining two or more words with or without morphological modification, e.g. door-knob, cheeseburger, pound saver, wild-animal-tamer.
English Lexicology
Lecture Two
Morpheme
Words are not the most fundamental sound-meaning units. The most elemental grammatical units in a language are morphemes.
For example, moralizers is an English word composed of four morphemes: moral + lize + er +s.
A morpheme may be a complete word. For example, the, fierce, desk, eat, boot, at, fee, mosquito cannot be divided up into smaller units that are meaningful themselves.
One morpheme: boy, desire, say Two morphemes: boy+ish, desire+able Three morphemes: boy+ish+ness, desire+able+ity Four morphemes: gentle+man+li+ness,
un+desire+able+ity More than four morphemes:
un+gentle+man+li+ness
Phonemes, which are the smallest working units of sound per se, build up into morphemes. A morpheme is composed of one or more phonemes.
Lexeme
A lexeme or lexical item is a unit of lexical meaning, which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain.
away from, cut down on, hurry up, in front of, switch on, steam iron.
For some words, such as adverbs or prepositions, which have no grammatical variants, the headword in the dictionary consists of only one form.
For example, the suffix –er is a morpheme in gardener and speaker, but it is not a morpheme in never or consider.
Simple words such as door, knob, wild, animal are morphologically unanalysable.
This shows that where the allomorph an occurs, its counterpart a cannot occur and vice versa.
The use of the indefinite article described above may be defined as: a before consonant sounds (e.g. a battle) and an before vowel sounds (e.g. an apple).
Hence, the forms cat, chair, farm, -ing, -s and –er are all morphs.
Two or more morphs may vary ly and still have the same meaning.
For example, the indefinite article may be realized either as a or as an, depending on the sound (not the letter) at the beginning of the following word.
In these cases, we shall say that unless a word can be completely analyzed into morphemes, it should be regarded as unanalysable.
It must also be noted that a sound sequence that is a morpheme in some words does not necessarily constitute a morpheme in all its occurrences.
Thus, lexeme is considered an abstract linguistic unit with different variants (e.g. sing as against sang, sung).
Morph
Any concrete realization of a morpheme in a given utterance is called a morph. It is a physical form representing some morphemes in a language.
Complex (or derived) words such as spoonful, wildish, reanimate, mentally, farmer are formed from simpler words by the addition of affixes or some other kind of morphological modification.
Lexeme is an abstract vocabulary item. The headwords in a dictionary are lexemes.
A lexeme may consist of one word, such as big, boy, break down, quick but it may also contain more than one word, e.g.
Morphemes are the ultimate grammatical constituents, the smallest meaningful units of language.