A word is the smallest free form in a language, but you just saw that you can identify virago as a noun because of the –s that can be added at the end. It appears, then, that words are not the smallest units of meaning. The smallest units of meaning are called morphemes. Morphemes can be complete words, or they can be smaller parts of words that have meaning.

Morpheme = Smallest unit of meaning; minimal and unanalyzable

• Like a word, a morpheme carries meaning or function information.
• Unanalyzable means something can’t be broken down any further, in this case, a morpheme can't be broken down into smaller parts that still have meaning.

Analysis of Words for Morphemes

We can analyze words to see if we can separate or divide them into smaller parts. When we divide words into syllables, we are dividing the words into smaller pronunciation units, but syllables don't necessarily carry meaning. For example, the word basket has two syllables (bas-ket), but neither syllable means anything by itself. That is, bas has no meaning in English, and neither does ket. Syllables aren't the same thing as morphemes.

On the other hand, we can divide the word cats into two parts, too, but the two parts aren't separate pronunciation parts (syllables). Instead, there are two meaning parts in cats (cat + -s). The first part is a word that refers to an animal. The second part is an addition that refers to plurality.

Thus, we can say that basket has two syllables but only one morpheme, and we can say that cats has one syllable but two morphemes.

A Simple Word has only one morpheme, or only one division that has meaning. Syllables are divisions that are based on pronunciation, not on meaning. Morphemes are divisions that are based on meaning. Examples:

• Eat
• Category

A Complex Word has two or more morphemes:

• Cats = Cat + -s (two morphemes: cat = animal, -s = plural)
• Tomcats = Tom + cat + -s (Three morphemes: tom = male, cat=animal, -s = plural)
  

Consider the Following:

We have already learned how to analyze words for morphemes, so it was probably easy to see that bears in the first example is similar to cats. It refers to the plural of a word for an animal. It was also probably easy to see the two morphemes in the word bears in the second example, and you probably also noticed that it has a different meaning in this sentence from the first sentence. The difference in meaning is a big deal in word formation (morphology).

Although the words look the same, or seem to be formed in the same way, there is a big difference between them, and linguists have ways to talk about the similarity of form and the difference in meaning. They use the word morph to talk about the similarity, and the word morpheme to talk about the difference. The word morph simply means form, so when two words look the same, we say they have the same morph. The word morpheme refers to the meaning as well as the form of a word, so when we say the two words have different morphemes in them, we mean that they either have different meanings or that they have different forms.

bear in #1 and bear in #2 are different morphemes, but same morph (form)

–s in #1 and –s in #2 are different morphemes, but same morph (form)

Consider these examples:

All the above words use the same morpheme, -s; adding the meaning of plurality.

And now consider these examples

Is the morpheme showing plurality the same in all three or different?

Morphemes with different sounds but the same meaning are called allomorphs.

• Morphs with the same sound are the same morpheme if they have the same meaning
  (like plural -s on dogs and birds).
• Morphs with different meanings are not the same morpheme, even if they sound the same
  (like -s on bears and on hears).
• Morphs with the same meanings but different sounds are allomophs
  (like -s on cats and -es on pusses).