What is a Morpheme?The term 'morpheme' was introduced in Chapter 2. There we saw that a morpheme is an abstraction a way from a number (possibly only one, possibly more) of morphs which share meaning and form and are in complementary distribution. It was perhaps implicit in Chapter 2, but not stated explicitly, that morphemes must analyse a word exhaustively; there can be no bits of the word left over which do not belong to any morpheme. This is actually a very narrow definition of morpheme and few practising linguists today would wish to adhere to it strictly. The reason is that there are a number of problems with such a definition. Some of the problems particularly those relating to recognising shared form and meaning, will be taken up in Chapter 9. Here we will consider some of the problems and discuss some of the ways in which the notion of a morpheme has been modified to avoid the problems. At one theoretical extreme, we will consider a position in which the morpheme is eliminated as a unit of analysis.

7.1 PROBLEMS WITH MORPHEMESThe whole notion of morpheme works best when each word is easily divisible into one or more discrete morphs, as in (1). This divides each word up into self contained units which are adjacent in the word, and is sometimes called the 'beads on a string' approach to morphology.

(i) person-al-iti-esPersonalities

dis-em-power-mentdisempowerment

in-coher-ent-lyincoherently

While analyses of this type are possible in large proportions of many languages, there are also many places where this kind of analysis simply will not account for the data. Some such examples have already been discussed.

Portmanteau morphs or cumulation was discussed in examples (4)-(6) in Chapter 3. There it was shown that we could have distinct meanings which could not be attributed to separate morphs but had to be piled up on a single morph. The standard notion of morpheme requires that each morpheme should have its own form and this is not true with cumulation. This is a case where there is meaning but no form.

The converse is also found: the situation where there is form but meaning. This can be illustrated with the French adverbial formations in (2). It can be seen that the adverbs are consistently derived from the feminine form of the adjective but there is no mine meaning in adverbs. Accordingly, we have a form (to which would we would normally be able to attribute a meaning in a straightforward way) but the meaning associated with that form is lacking in these instances. Interfixes, discussed in section 3.1.5, were another example of such empty morphs.

gloss masculine femenine AdverbComplete comple complet CompletmaCool coolFrankGentleHappyhaspy

Examples of Ablaut, like those in (3) were also cited in Chapter 3. Here, there are a number of possible modes of analysis, none of which is entirely satisfactory.

(3) sing sang

stand stoodswing swungtake took

One option would be to analyse these forms as having infies. Apart from being typologically odd (English is not a language which typically uses infixes), this runs into trouble with the meanings of the infixes. For instance, the /ei/ in the middle of take cannot easily be glossed as 'present tense' when it also appears in taken. An alternative analysis, perhaps even more theoretically dubious, is to see the replacement of /i/ in sing by /a/ as being a morph. This, however is playing with the theoretical concepts: a morph is defined as a form, not as a process of replacement (see above, p. 36). Finally, we might simply refuse to analyse word such as those in (3) intro more than one morph and see (at least some of) the words as further cases of cumulation.