Morphemes and Phonemes"

Topic:  "Morphemes and Phonemes"

(A) Morpheme
Morphemes are the smallest units of
meaning in a language.
  addition, morphemes are
related to the meaning and structure of
the language while phoneme is related
to the sound and pronunciation of the
language.

Morphemes can be classified
into two categories as
(1) Free Morphemes
and
(2) Bound Morphemes.

(1) Free morphemes are the morphemes
that can stand alone, with a specific
meaning. Therefore, free morphemes
act as words.

Some examples for free
morphemes include dog, cow, dish, yes,
ship, event, run, eat etc. However keep
in mind that, not all free morphemes
can be considered as words.

(2) Bound morphemes are the morphemes
that cannot stand alone. They appear
only as parts of words, and when used
alone, they do not have a meaning.
Most bound morphemes in the English
are affixes. They can be used before or
after the base word.(Base or a root is a
morpheme in a word that gives the
word its principle meaning.) The affixes
that come before a base are called
prefixes. The affixes that come after a
base are called suffixes.
Examples:
Prefix: un happy, postpone,
dis believe
Suffix: happily, kind ness,
believable

(B) Phonemes are the
smallest units of sound in a language. In
Chinese, each phoneme corresponds to a
morpheme and each morpheme corresponds
to a morpheme.
For example, in English we have the word
"cat." "Cat" is a complete idea, and it
cannot be broken down into smaller ideas
based upon the word. "Cat" is also a
complete sound. While each letter in "cat"
corresponds to a specific sound, separately
they are not complete. Every character in
Chinese represents a single morpheme and
has a corresponding phoneme very similar to
the word "cat".
On the other hand, English has many cases
where more than one phoneme is
corresponds to a single morpheme. For
instance, in telephone there are two
morphemes: tele and phone. In the same
word there are seven phonemes:
t, e, l, e, f,
o, and n.

Here Given below are some terms that are useful in
studying phonemes.

(1) Allophones: One of a set of multiple
possible spoken sounds or signs used
to pronounce a single phoneme in a
particular language. This implies that a
phoneme can have more than one
sound.

(2) Minimal pair: Pair of words or phrases
in a particular language that differ in
only one phonological element such as
phoneme. For example, pin and bin,
Phonemes can be further classified as
vowel phonemes and consonant
phonemes. Some examples of vowel
phonemes include
/e/ – peg, bread
/ear/ – fear, here
/ ue/ -moon, tone
Some examples for consonant
phonemes include
/ch/ – chip, watch
/p/ – pit, pin

"Note"
that phonemes are always written
inside slashes.
"Difference Between Morpheme
and Phoneme"

Definition
Morpheme is the smallest grammatical
and meaningful unit in a language.

Phoneme is the smallest contrastive
unit in the sound system of a language.

Study
Morpheme is studied in morphology

Phoneme is studied in phonology.

Words
Morpheme can be a word.

Phonemes make words, but one
phoneme cannot make a word.

Relation
Morpheme is related to the meaning
and structure of the language.

Phoneme is related to the sound and
pronunciation of the language.