Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use morpheme in a sentence

22 example sentences · noun

Morpheme means the smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise. Example: “Book is a free morpheme, but the -s on books is not, because -s carries no meaning until joined to a free morpheme.”

Examples of morpheme by meaning

nounThe smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.

  • Just as a regiment is ultimately made up of soldiers, so the sentence is of morphemes—they are its ultimate constituents.1970, Thomas Pyles, John Algeo, English: An Introduction to Language, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, page 135

More sentences with morpheme

  • Book is a free morpheme, but the -s on books is not, because -s carries no meaning until joined to a free morpheme.From the entry free morpheme
  • The morpheme in question is the reflexive prefix ('infix' in the traditional Bantu terminology).2023, Bostoen, de Schryver, Guérois & Pacchiarotti, editor, On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar, page 709. From the entry infix
  • Consider, then, the result of applying these tense morphemes to a perfective or an imperfective verb.2012, Ronald W. Langacker, Essentials of Cognitive Grammar, Oxford University Press, page 157. From the entry imperfective
  • When the morpheme 'mente' comes at the end of a word it is normally an adverb.2010 October 28, checkacheck, “TIL superextraordinarísimamente (“extremely superextraordinary”) is the longest Spanish word”, in reddit.com. From the entry superextraordinarily
  • Stipulation of the order of segments in a morpheme is considered "normal" and, therefore, not templatic.2007, Matti Miestamo, Bernhard Wälchli, New Challenges in Typology, →ISBN. From the entry templatic
  • First, a number of languages do not have a single negation morpheme but have a circumfixal morpheme.1997, Ferdinand de Haan, The Interaction of Modality and Negation. From the entry circumfixal
  • The protractive, durational, and continuative morphemes are examples of nonpunctual modifications .1990, Harry Bornstein, Manual Communication: Implications for Education, page 88. From the entry protractive
  • Learnèdness may affect all the morphemes in a word, or only the base, or only an affix.1972, Edgar N. Mayer, “Morphophone, Diamorphophone and Protomorphophone”, in M. Estellie Smith, editor, Studies in Linguistics: In Honor…. From the entry learnèdness
  • One cannot consistently judge the grammaticality of utterances without knowing what grammatical types their constituent morphemes represent.1963, Peter Lackowski, “Words as Grammatical Primes”, in Language, volume 39, number 2, page 214. From the entry grammaticality
  • There are many other situations where the zeal with which the linguist identifies morphemes has to be tempered.2018, Francis Katamba, “Morphology: Word Structure”, in Jonathan Culpeper et al., editors, English Language: Description, Variation and…. From the entry cranberry word
  • Sonorants do not normally precede voiceless obstruents within a morpheme due to the historical process of voicening (see 4.2.5).2011, Irina Nikolaeva, A Historical Dictionary of Yukaghir, page 35. From the entry voicening
  • In this case, then, the infinitival morpheme functions more locally to simply derank the verb in the purpose clause.2009, Karsten Schmidtke-Bode, A Typology of Purpose Clauses, →ISBN, page 72. From the entry derank
  • On the whole, affixally polysynthetic languages exhibit the largest set of non-root bound morphemes both in number and variety.2008, Dieter Wunderlich, Advances in the Theory of the Lexicon, page 334. From the entry affixally
  • There is no such thing as free morpheme order.2001, Yehuda Falk, “Lexical-Functional Grammar”, in CSLI Publications, archived from the original on 01 Jul 2024, retrieved 21 Feb 2014. From the entry morphology
  • In Gurage, we find the morpheme t(ä)- with the same distribution: with Imperfect it means “when” and with Perfect “if”.1969, Robert Hetzron, The Verbal System of Southern Agaw, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 74. From the entry Cushitism
  • Let us pass now from a consideration of lexicon to that of morpheme analysis, as practised by linguicists.128, Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics - Issue 8, page 1955. From the entry linguicist
  • A few languages are either virtually grammarless, like Chinese, or have few supplementary morphemes grouped in form-classes, like English or French.1947, Melville Jacobs, Bernhard Joseph Stern, Outline of anthropology. From the entry grammarless
  • The goal of a grammarian is to discover the morphemes and words within a language, and to discover how they combine in the grammar.2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Preliminaries: Components of Language Structure” (chapter 2), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press…. From the entry grammarian
  • A root cannot form a phonological or a grammatical word on its own; it commences a word and is followed by bound morphemes (suffixes).2020 November 5, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon, Nathan M. White, Phonological Word and Grammatical Word: A Cross-Linguistic…. From the entry grammatical word
  • Kinship terminology is reportedly not used vocatively in family II, whereas it is in family I (note that Kwaza has no vocative morpheme).2004, Hein van der Voort, A Grammar of Kwaza, page 722. From the entry vocatively
  • The monosyllabicity of Chinese morphemes and units of writing has certain advantages in the use of operational synonyms of symbols under varying conditions of use.1976, Yuen Ren Chao, Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, →ISBN, page 93. From the entry monosyllabicity

Meaning of morpheme

  1. noun The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.

Full definition of morpheme

Questions about morpheme in a sentence

How do you use morpheme in a sentence?
Morpheme is used as a noun. For example: “Book is a free morpheme, but the -s on books is not, because -s carries no meaning until joined to a free morpheme.”
What is a short sentence with morpheme?
“There is no such thing as free morpheme order.”
What does morpheme mean?
Morpheme means the smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: morpheme (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use morpheme in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/morpheme. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.