Tabla de Contenidos
Words are one of the most important elements in spoken and written language. Words are defined as “a lexical unit” and are the object of study of various sciences, especially linguistics. Within linguistics, morphology is studied, a discipline focused on reviewing the internal structure of words, that is, how they are built. It is there where we start talking about the lexeme or root.
the lexeme
Words are made up of minimal meaningful units known as monemes. Monemes, for their part, are classified into lexemes and morphemes.
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy defines the lexeme as the “minimum unit with lexical meaning that does not present grammatical morphemes”. It is also known as the root of the words , since it expresses the essential meaning of these , gives them meaning and makes them understandable to the speakers of a language.
All the words that are constituted by the same lexeme form what we know as a family of words. These families are formed from primitive words, which are those that do not come from any other word. For example, flower is a primitive word and from it derives a family of words that includes terms such as flor istería, flor ero, flor ido, flor ecido and flor al.
the morpheme
Words can contain an invariable part within them, which is the lexeme; while the variable part is called a morpheme. These are added to the lexemes to give a new twist to the root and from there create new words. However, on their own, morphemes may also be capable of expressing meaning.
Depending on where they are located (before or after the lexeme), morphemes can be used as a prefix or suffix, giving a different meaning to the word to which it is added. For example, in the word niño , the root of the word is “ niñ” and the morpheme is “ o ” where o is the suffix. If instead of or we add the morpheme “ a ”, the word changes to girl. In another example, if we add the super morpheme as a prefix to the word market , the new word would be supermarket .
Morphemes are classified as dependent (those that need a root to have meaning) and independent (those that do not need a root to understand each other). Dependent morphemes, in turn, can be inflectional (those that denote grammatical differences such as gender and number changes) or derivatives (those that change part of the meaning of the word). In Spanish, independent morphemes are made up of grammatical elements such as prepositions, conjunctions, and determiners.
Sources
- JAF Academy. (nd). Words ( monemes: lexemes and morphemes ).
- Beltramino, F. (2013). Classification of grammatical categories in the Spanish mother tongue.
