![]() ![]() This article attempts to highlight this difference through a description of the two terms. What is a Morpheme?Ī morpheme refers to the smallest meaningful element of a word. ![]() A morpheme cannot be further broken into parts. For example, chair, dog, bird, table, computer are all morphemes. As you can see they express a direct meaning yet cannot be further separated into smaller parts. However, a morpheme is not similar to a syllable as it carries a meaning. For example, when we say giraffe, it consists of a number of syllables but a single morpheme. Sometimes a single word can carry a number of morphemes. Let us try to understand this through an example. If we take the word ‘regained’, this word consists of 3 morphemes. " smallest unit of grammar that can stand alone as a complete utterance, separated by spaces in written language and potentially by pauses in speech.".David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. is divided into two major components, syntax and morphology. This division follows from the special status of the word as a basic linguistic unit, with syntax dealing with the combination of words to make sentences, and morphology with the form of words themselves." -R. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. "We want words to do more than they can.Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1912 Nevertheless there they are we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them." We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. looked at how using big words (a classic strategy for impressing others) affects perceived intelligence. Julie Beck, "How to Look Smart." The Atlantic, September 2014 Put another way: simpler writing seems smarter." Counter-intuitvely, grandiose vocabulary diminished participants' impressions of authors' cerebral capacity. ![]() "It is obvious that the fundamental means which man possesses of extending his orders of abstractions indefinitely is conditioned, and consists in general in symbolism and, in particular, in speech. Words, considered as symbols for humans, provide us with endlessly flexible conditional semantic stimuli, which are just as 'real' and effective for man as any other powerful stimulus. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. ![]() Yet there is the dictionary there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra poems lovelier than the 'Ode to a Nightingale' novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. ![]()
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