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Smallest lexical item in a language

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme cat); other morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the s in cats indicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind of plurality. This distinction is not universal and does not apply to, for example, Latin, in which many roots cannot stand alone. For instance, the Latin root reg ('king') must always be suffixed with a case marker: rex (reg s), reg is, reg i, etc. For a language like Latin, a root can be defined as the main lexical morpheme of a word. These sample English words have the following morphological analyses:
"Unbreakable" is composed of three morphemes: un (a bound morpheme signifying "not"), break (the root, a free morpheme), and able (a bound morpheme signifying "an ability to be done"). The plural morpheme for regular nouns ( s) has three allomorphs: it is pronounced (e. g., in cats /k//æ//t//s/), (e. g., in dishes /d//ɪ//ʃ//ᵻ//z/), and (e. g., in dogs /d//ɒ//ɡ//z/), depending on the pronunciation of the root.

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional morphemes. The main difference between them is their function in relation to words.

Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change the semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un functions as a derivational morpheme since it inverts the meaning of the root morpheme (word) kind. Generally, morphemes that affix to a root morpheme (word) are bound morphemes.

Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb or the number, grammatical gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding s to the root dog to form dogs and adding ed to wait to form waited. An inflectional morpheme changes the form of a word. English has eight inflections.

Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in form but are semantically similar. For example, the English plural marker has three allomorphs: (bugs), (bats), or (buses). 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 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 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 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 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 is a general rule to determine the category of a morpheme:
Content morphemes include free morphemes that are nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and main verbs and bound morphemes that are bound roots and derivational affixes. For children with dyslexia, it has been shown to be an effective way of building up a word. The word 'inviting' as an example contains two commonly used morphemes, 'in ' and ' ing'. A morphological icon for 'in ' could be an arrow going into a cup, and ' ing' could be an arrow going forward to symbolise that something is in action (as in being, running, fishing). The concept of combining visual aid icons with morpheme teaching methods was pioneered from the mid 1980s by Neville Brown. He founded the Maple Hayes school for dyslexia in 1981, where he later improved the method alongside his son, Daryl Brown. The school's curriculum uses morphological icons as a learning aid.

In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese, and other languages, morphological analysis 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 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 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.