Morpheme (linguistics)

A morpheme is a sign that cannot be decomposed any further. A single, minimal unit of meaning. For example, the meaning of the word submarine is composed of its two parts: two morphemes: sub, and marine, each with their own meaning. The greater unit composed of many morphemes needn't be a single word; take for example, an idiom such as kick the bucket.

The lexical makeup of a morpheme is below the scope of morphology's abstractions.

Formally, a morpheme is defined relative to a grammar G: a sign S ∈ Morphemes(G) iff S is not a member of any of the grammar's operations' ranges; literally, if S cannot be constructed without simply pulling it from the lexicon.

Morphologically, the word 'car' is a noun whose plural uses an -s suffix.

This notation says that the morpheme belongs to morphological category 'n' (for 'nominal') and to the inflectional category 's-pl' (the category of morphemes whose plural is formed with an -s.)

Syntactically, we instead see

This says we have an object of category N whose number is plural.

Now, for the merge on the syntactic stratum let us look again at ‘this year’. The second part, ‘year’ is a noun, the first a determiner. The entire complex has the category of a determiner phrase (DP). Both are singular. Hence, we have that in syntax

$$\begin{array}{c}\left[\begin{array}{cccc}& \text{ᴄᴀᴛ}& :\text{D}& \text{<span class="tml-eqn"></span>}\\ & \text{ɴᴜᴍ}& :\text{sg}& \text{<span class="tml-eqn"></span>}\end{array}\right]{\bullet }_L\left[\begin{array}{cccc}& \text{ᴄᴀᴛ}& :\text{N}& \text{<span class="tml-eqn"></span>}\\ & \text{ɴᴜᴍ}& :\text{sg}& \text{<span class="tml-eqn"></span>}\end{array}\right]=\left[\begin{array}{cccc}& \text{ᴄᴀᴛ}& :\text{DP}& \text{<span class="tml-eqn"></span>}\\ & \text{ɴᴜᴍ}& :\text{sg}& \text{<span class="tml-eqn"></span>}\end{array}\right]\end{array}$$

This tells us very little about the action of ${\bullet }_L$ . In fact, large parts of syntactic theory are consumed by finding out what merge does in syntax!