A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes . The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology .
41-892: Kentuckiana , a portmanteau of Kentucky and Indiana , is the area in the Upland South region of the United States containing metropolitan areas with counties in both Kentucky and Indiana. Kentuckiana is primarily the Louisville metropolitan area , including nine counties in Kentucky ( Jefferson , Bullitt , Hardin , Oldham , Meade , Shelby , Trimble , Henry , and Spencer ) and five counties in Southern Indiana ( Clark , Floyd , Harrison , Scott , and Washington ). This area "is regularly referred to as Kentuckiana". One other area that could lay claim to using
82-442: A " stish " or a " starsh ", it would be a blend. Furthermore, when blends are formed by shortening established compounds or phrases, they can be considered clipped compounds , such as romcom for romantic comedy . Blends of two or more words may be classified from each of three viewpoints: morphotactic, morphonological, and morphosemantic. Blends may be classified morphotactically into two kinds: total and partial . In
123-535: A form suitable for carrying on horseback; (now esp.) one in the form of a stiff leather case hinged at the back to open into two equal parts". According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language ( AHD ), the etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau , from porter , "to carry", and manteau , "cloak" (from Old French mantel , from Latin mantellum ). According to
164-427: A kind of bath), the attributive blends of English are mostly head-final and mostly endocentric . As an example of an exocentric attributive blend, Fruitopia may metaphorically take the buyer to a fruity utopia (and not a utopian fruit); however, it is not a utopia but a drink. Coordinate blends (also called associative or portmanteau blends) combine two words having equal status, and have two heads. Thus brunch
205-486: A total blend, each of the words creating the blend is reduced to a mere splinter. Some linguists limit blends to these (perhaps with additional conditions): for example, Ingo Plag considers "proper blends" to be total blends that semantically are coordinate, the remainder being "shortened compounds". Commonly for English blends, the beginning of one word is followed by the end of another: Much less commonly in English,
246-423: A word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together. English examples include smog , coined by blending smoke and fog , as well as motel , from motor ( motorist ) and hotel . A blend is similar to a contraction . On the one hand, mainstream blends tend to be formed at a particular historical moment followed by a rapid rise in popularity. Contractions, on
287-420: Is frankenword , an autological word exemplifying the phenomenon it describes, blending " Frankenstein " and "word". Morpheme In English, inside a word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as cat inside the word cats ), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes , may be added before or after
328-477: Is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. The Vietnamese language also encourages blend words formed from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary . For example, the term Việt Cộng is derived from the first syllables of "Việt Nam" (Vietnam) and "Cộng sản" (communist). Many corporate brand names , trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are blends. For example, Wiktionary , one of Misplaced Pages 's sister projects,
369-496: Is a blend of wiki and dictionary . The word portmanteau was introduced in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of unusual words used in " Jabberwocky ". Slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy means "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways, comparing it to
410-418: Is a general rule to determine the category of a morpheme: Roots are composed of only one morpheme, but stems can be composed of more than one morpheme. Any additional affixes are considered morphemes. For example, in the word quirkiness , the root is quirk , but the stem is quirky , which has two morphemes. Moreover, some pairs of affixes have identical phonological form but different meanings. For example,
451-436: Is a type of morpheme that carries semantic meaning but is not represented by auditory phoneme. A word with a zero-morpheme is analyzed as having the morpheme for grammatical purposes, but the morpheme is not realized in speech. They are often represented by / ∅ / within glosses . Generally, such morphemes have no visible changes. For instance, sheep is both the singular and the plural form of that noun; rather than taking
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#1732772695493492-440: Is both phonological and orthographic, but with no other shortening: The overlap may be both phonological and orthographic, and with some additional shortening to at least one of the ingredients: Such an overlap may be discontinuous: These are also termed imperfect blends. It can occur with three components: The phonological overlap need not also be orthographic: If the phonological but non-orthographic overlap encompasses
533-484: Is identical in pronunciation (and written form) but has an unrelated meaning and function: a comparative morpheme that changes an adjective into another degree of comparison (but remains the same adjective) (e.g. small → smaller ). The opposite can also occur: a pair of morphemes with identical meaning but different forms. In generative grammar , the definition of a morpheme depends heavily on whether syntactic trees have morphemes as leaves or features as leaves. Given
574-699: Is neither a breakfasty lunch nor a lunchtime breakfast but instead some hybrid of breakfast and lunch; Oxbridge is equally Oxford and Cambridge universities. This too parallels (conventional, non-blend) compounds: an actor–director is equally an actor and a director. Two kinds of coordinate blends are particularly conspicuous: those that combine (near‑) synonyms: and those that combine (near‑) opposites: Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew : "There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár 'bank clerk, teller'. The first
615-433: Is represented by various shorter substitutes – ‑otel ... – which I shall call splinters. Words containing splinters I shall call blends". Thus, at least one of the parts of a blend, strictly speaking, is not a complete morpheme , but instead a mere splinter or leftover word fragment. For instance, starfish is a compound, not a blend, of star and fish , as it includes both words in full. However, if it were called
656-405: Is that it consists of (Hebrew>) Israeli כסף késef 'money' and the ( International /Hebrew>) Israeli agentive suffix ר- -ár . The second is that it is a quasi- portmanteau word which blends כסף késef 'money' and (Hebrew>) Israeli ספר √spr 'count'. Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár started as a brand name but soon entered the common language. Even if the second analysis is the correct one,
697-415: Is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of morphemes. Morphological analysis is closely related to part-of-speech tagging , but word segmentation is required for those languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces. The purpose of morphological analysis is to determine the minimal units of meaning in a language (morphemes) by comparison of similar forms: such as comparing "She
738-428: Is their function in relation to words. Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in form but are semantically similar. For example, the English plural marker has three allomorphs: /-z/ ( bug s ), /-s/ ( bat s ), or /-ɪz, -əz/ ( bus es ). An allomorph is a concrete realization of a morpheme, which is an abstract unit. That is parallel to the relation of an allophone and a phoneme . A zero-morpheme
779-445: Is true of the English root nat(e) — ultimately inherited from a Latin root meaning "birth, born" — which appears in words like native , nation , nature , innate , and neonate . These sample English words have the following morphological analyses: Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound: Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional morphemes. The main difference between them
820-464: Is walking" and "They are walking" with each other, rather than either with something less similar like "You are reading". Those forms can be effectively broken down into parts, and the different morphemes can be distinguished. Both meaning and form are equally important for the identification of morphemes. An agent morpheme is an affix like -er that in English transforms a verb into a noun (e.g. teach → teacher ). English also has another morpheme that
861-533: The OED Online , the etymology of the word is the "officer who carries the mantle of a person in a high position (1507 in Middle French), case or bag for carrying clothing (1547), clothes rack (1640)". In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet , a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like. An occasional synonym for "portmanteau word"
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#1732772695493902-506: The 1980s the term has expanded to include more counties on both sides of the Ohio River . Today it refers to an indefinitely large region where Kentucky and Indiana meet, usually centered on Louisville, Kentucky . 38°57′32″N 83°58′44″W / 38.959°N 83.979°W / 38.959; -83.979 Portmanteau In linguistics , a blend —also known as a blend word , lexical blend , or portmanteau —is
943-494: The 19th century as a collection of items from or relating to Kentucky. The modern meaning of term as a geographical area was coined by The Louisville Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times sometime during the 1930s. This second definition originally referred to only Jefferson County, Kentucky and Clark and Floyd Counties in Indiana - this referring to the geographic center of the Louisville metropolitan area . Since
984-502: The beginning of one word may be followed by the beginning of another: Some linguists do not regard beginning+beginning concatenations as blends, instead calling them complex clippings, clipping compounds or clipped compounds . Unusually in English, the end of one word may be followed by the end of another: A splinter of one word may replace part of another, as in three coined by Lewis Carroll in " Jabberwocky ": They are sometimes termed intercalative blends; these words are among
1025-420: The definition of a morpheme as "the smallest meaningful unit", nanosyntax aims to account for idioms in which an entire syntactic tree often contributes "the smallest meaningful unit". An example idiom is "Don't let the cat out of the bag". There, the idiom is composed of "let the cat out of the bag". That might be considered a semantic morpheme, which is itself composed of many syntactic morphemes. Other cases of
1066-599: The final syllable ר- -ár apparently facilitated nativization since it was regarded as the Hebrew suffix ר- -år (probably of Persian pedigree), which usually refers to craftsmen and professionals, for instance as in Mendele Mocher Sforim 's coinage סמרטוטר smartutár 'rag-dealer'." Blending may occur with an error in lexical selection , the process by which a speaker uses his semantic knowledge to choose words. Lewis Carroll's explanation, which gave rise to
1107-431: The grammatical function of indicating past tense . Both categories may seem very clear and intuitive, but the idea behind them is occasionally more difficult to grasp since they overlap with each other. Examples of ambiguous situations are the preposition over and the determiner your , which seem to have concrete meanings but are considered function morphemes since their role is to connect ideas grammatically. Here
1148-403: The ingredients is the head and the other is attributive. A porta-light is a portable light, not a 'light-emitting' or light portability; light is the head. A snobject is a snobbery-satisfying object and not an objective or other kind of snob; object is the head. As is also true for (conventional, non-blend) attributive compounds (among which bathroom , for example, is a kind of room, not
1189-495: The morphemes or phonemes stay in the same position within the syllable. Some languages, like Japanese , encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo ), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, karaoke , a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty ) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora , オーケストラ ),
1230-633: The name is the combined metros of Evansville, Indiana and Owensboro, Kentucky , though that region identifies more on its own as "The Tri-State Area " combined. Dearborn , Ohio and Franklin Counties in Indiana make up the western portion of the Cincinnati metropolitan area and make no claims to the Kentuckiana name on their own. The original meaning of the term Kentuckiana dates back to
1271-495: The original "portmanteaus" for which this meaning of the word was created. In a partial blend, one entire word is concatenated with a splinter from another. Some linguists do not recognize these as blends. An entire word may be followed by a splinter: A splinter may be followed by an entire word: An entire word may replace part of another: These have also been called sandwich words, and classed among intercalative blends. (When two words are combined in their entirety,
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1312-491: The other hand, are formed by the gradual drifting together of words over time due to them commonly appearing together in sequence, such as do not naturally becoming don't (phonologically, / d uː n ɒ t / becoming / d oʊ n t / ). A blend also differs from a compound , which fully preserves the stems of the original words. The British lecturer Valerie Adams's 1973 Introduction to Modern English Word-Formation explains that "In words such as motel ..., hotel
1353-453: The result is considered a compound word rather than a blend. For example, bagpipe is a compound, not a blend, of bag and pipe. ) Morphologically, blends fall into two kinds: overlapping and non-overlapping . Overlapping blends are those for which the ingredients' consonants, vowels or even syllables overlap to some extent. The overlap can be of different kinds. These are also called haplologic blends. There may be an overlap that
1394-415: The root cat and the plural suffix -s, and so the singular cat may be analyzed as the root inflected with the null singular suffix - ∅ . Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or content , and function morphemes have more of a grammatical role. For example, the morphemes fast and sad can be considered content morphemes. On the other hand, the suffix -ed is a function morpheme since it has
1435-456: The root, like the -s in cats , which indicates plurality but is always bound to a root noun and is not regarded as a word on its own. However, in some languages, including English and Latin , even many roots cannot stand alone; i.e., they are bound morphemes. For instance, the Latin root reg- ('king') must always be suffixed with a case marker: regis , regi , rex ( reg+s ), etc. The same
1476-629: The suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g. sell ⇒ seller ) or inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller ). Such morphemes are called homophonous . Some words might seem to be composed of multiple morphemes but are not. Therefore, not only form but also meaning must be considered when identifying morphemes. For example, the word Madagascar is long and might seem to have morphemes like mad , gas , and car , but it does not. Conversely, some short words have multiple morphemes (e.g. dogs = dog + s ). In natural language processing for Japanese , Chinese , and other languages, morphological analysis
1517-484: The then-common type of luggage , which opens into two equal parts: You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word. In his introduction to his 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark , Carroll again uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take
1558-462: The two words "fuming" and "furious". Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious". In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections. According to the OED Online , a portmanteau is a "case or bag for carrying clothing and other belongings when travelling; (originally) one of
1599-406: The use of 'portmanteau' for such combinations, was: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words ... you will say "frumious." The errors are based on similarity of meanings, rather than phonological similarities, and
1640-441: The usual plural suffix -s to form hypothetical *sheeps , the plural is analyzed as being composed of sheep + -∅ , the null plural suffix. The intended meaning is thus derived from the co-occurrence determiner (in this case, "some-" or "a-"). In some cases, a zero-morpheme may also be used to contrast with other inflected forms of a word that contain an audible morpheme. For example, the plural noun cats in English consists of
1681-542: The whole of the shorter ingredient, as in then the effect depends on orthography alone. (They are also called orthographic blends. ) An orthographic overlap need not also be phonological: For some linguists, an overlap is a condition for a blend. Non-overlapping blends (also called substitution blends) have no overlap, whether phonological or orthographic: Morphosemantically, blends fall into two kinds: attributive and coordinate . Attributive blends (also called syntactic or telescope blends) are those in which one of