What is meant by a “word” also varies within a single language, including whether we are talking about speaking words or writing them. Perhaps you would want to say that karaoke-singers is two words, because of the hyphen separating karaoke from singers in the spelling? Or would it satisfy you better to say that it is a single word, because it has a unique meaning, just like say, sopranos does? This is a single word whose meaning can be rephrased as ‘opera-singers’. The best definitions of the word word take either orthography (spelling) or rhythm into account. Orthographic definitions take word as a unit that is separated by a blank space on each side, in a printed text. Rhythmical definitions take it as a unit of speech that can be separated by an optional pause, meaning that a word can be pronounced on its own, preceded and followed by silence. The blank spaces on a page represent the possible silences between words. Robot-characters in some science-fiction films pronounce sentences in just this way, word by word.

The fact that we do understand what robot-like sentences mean, despite their stilted delivery, reveals one very important feature of human speech. This is that speech is a stream of ordered units, as already discussed in Chapter 1. Human speakers, and robots that attempt to replicate their speech, must order the units that make up their utterances in a particular way, so that the utterances so formed make sense. That is, linguistic units must occur in particular positions along the stream of speech, surrounded by other units. This observation helps us clarify one concept that is central to linguistic analysis, the concept of distribution.

5.3 Distribution

Linguistic units, like people or objects, show up in predictable places, or contexts. You wouldn’t expect to find the morning newspaper tucked away in the fridge, or a cat sitting next to you watching a movie at the cinema, or a palm tree in full bloom in the North Pole. Linguistic units pattern in the same predictable way.

The cat sleeps on the mat.

*The sleeps cat on the mat.

*The cat sleeps the on mat.

Noun (N)

Verb (V)

Verbs can be followed by a mark of past tense, often represented in spelling by -(e)d in so-called regular verbs. As noted above, we are only concerned with regular morphology. A word like bake fits this frame, and is therefore identified as a verb:

Today I / it , yesterday I / it (-ed)

Some sentences contain only one verb. Examples are I tripped or My neighbours have two dogs, where tripped and have are the verbs. Other sentences contain several verbs, from two up to a maximum of five, in English. Examples are Janet is singing and The laundry would have been being washed, where is singing and would have been being washed are all verbs. Some people doubt the “correctness” of the latter string of verbs, but there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it: it is simply a less common construction.

We call the last verb in strings like these the main verb, because this is the verb that carries the referential meaning that is being talked about. The other verbs are called auxiliary verbs, or auxiliaries, because their function is to help specify the time and duration of the action or state indicated by the main verb. In sentences with only one verb, this verb is of course the main verb. For example, the sentence Janet is beautiful has only one verb, is, and this is the main verb.

Three English verbs, be, do and have, can function either as main or auxiliary verbs. In the sentence My neighbours have two dogs the verb have is the main verb, whereas it is an auxiliary in the sentence The laundry would have been being washed. Because of this dual function, these verbs are very common in English, and because they are so common they are also very irregular. We saw above that newcomer words to a language, like email, that are therefore just becoming common in it, follow regular patterns, not irregular ones. Words are like clothes, the more you use them the more shapeless they get and the less they look like new clothes off the rack. The verb be is in fact the most irregular verb in English, in that it can appear in eight different forms. Just to satisfy your curiosity, these forms are: am, are, is, was, were, being, been and be itself!

Verbal forms that vary according to tense (and/or person, see below) are called finite forms. For example, forms like are, were, baked, bakes, are finite. If a sentence contains only one verb, the form of that verb is finite. The verb have is finite in the sentence My neighbours have two dogs, because it changes to had when we talk about the past, or to has when we say My neighbour has two dogs. Verbal forms that remain unchanged regardless of tense and person are non-finite forms. For example, (to) speak, speaking, spoken, and (to) be, being, been. In a sentence with main verb and auxiliaries, the first auxiliary is finite and all the other verb forms are non-finite. In the sentence The laundry would have been being washed, only the auxiliary would is finite.

Adjective (Adj)

Adjectives pattern in two typical ways. They can immediately precede nouns, or they can follow forms of a verb like be. The distributional frames for these two patterns are:

A _____ cow                  This cow is _____

If a word can pattern in these two ways, then it is an adjective: brown is one example. Typical adjectives do indeed pattern in these two alternative ways, although a few do not. Some adjectives can be used only before nouns. For example, you can say the current president, where current is an adjective, but you cannot say *the president is current. Conversely, other adjectives pattern only after be-like verbs: you can say dinner is ready, but not *a ready dinner.

The function of adjectives is to modify nouns. This means that adjectives tell us something about a noun, specifying a property or a quality of that noun. If we say the green book or that large whale, we’re indicating which particular book or whale we mean: green, not red, and large, not tiny. This qualification of nouns can also be a matter of degree. If we see first a large whale, and later a very, very large whale, we can express this by saying that the second whale is larger than the first. If we then see a third, absolutely enormous whale, we can say that this one is the largest of them all. In both cases we are comparing sizes, and grading them: one is larger than another, like one can be smaller than another, or one can have the greatest (or smallest) size compared to all the others. The technical names for these uses of adjectives are comparative and superlative, respectively.

Degree forms of adjectives vary according to the length of the adjective word. There are two rules. For short adjectives with one or two syllables, we add -(e)r and -(e)st at the end of the word. For long adjectives, we add separate words, more and most before the adjective. We can say that dolphins are more intelligent than whales, or that they are the most intelligent marine mammals, but we don’t say that they are *intelligenter than whales, or the *intelligentest of all. By the same token, we say easier, not *more easy, and easiest, not *most easy. (And yes, this short word vs. long word rule has several exceptions: short adjectives like tired and ready are examples.)

Adverb (Adv)

Traditionally, the “class” of adverbs is a sort of ragbag: if morphological criteria cannot clearly identify the class of a lexical word, the solution is often to call it an “adverb”.

This is not simply an easy way out of a difficulty in classifying certain words. It underscores the difficulty itself instead. Similar problems of classification usually arise for two main reasons: either we are basing our classification framework on insufficient data, or the classification framework itself needs revamping. In other words, either the number of clearly identifiable words that we have observed, large though it may be, is not enough to help us decide the word class of a particular word; or perhaps we should start thinking about discarding the class “adverb” altogether, and create new word classes that better explain what makes “adverbs” special. Zoologists, for example, had to create a new zoological class to account for platypuses, the very odd mammals that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young as “regular” mammals do. Facts, about living beings or language, cannot be changed to suit a theory that doesn’t explain them. It is the theory, no matter how respectable or how popular, that must change in order to serve our understanding of these facts. Adverbs may well be the platypuses of the grammatical zoo.

The facts are that attempting to identify adverbs on formal or distributional grounds is not straightforward, in that they may vary widely in shape as well as in patterning within phrases and sentences. The most common criteria used in the definition of adverbs are of two kinds. One, a referential criterion, states that the meaning of adverbs can modify the meaning of different words or phrases, including other adverbs. That is, their meaning attributes some quality to the meaning of another word. For example:

(5.3)

She is very pretty.

(5.4)

She speaks very fast.

In (5.3), very modifies the adjective pretty by intensifying its meaning. In (5.4), the word fast modifies the verb speaks by specifying the way in which the speaking takes place, and very in turn modifies fast. Both very and fast are therefore adverbs.

The second criterion is distributional, and states that adverbs are generally mobile words. This means that they may occur in different positions within an utterance without loss of grammaticality. For example:

(5.5)

Sadly, she is an idiot.        She, sadly, is an idiot.

She is, sadly, an idiot.       She is an idiot, sadly.

The mobility of sadly identifies it as an adverb. Note that mobility is further demarcated by pauses, in speech, and by commas, in print. Note also that this criterion would fail to identify very as an adverb.

Grammatical word classes

We said above that lexical word classes express content in terms of concepts of various kinds. In contrast, grammatical words represent distributional relationships between lexical words. Grammatical words belong in closed classes, in that new words of a language rarely are of this type. Across languages, the number of words in grammatical word classes is therefore much smaller than in lexical word classes. In the literature, other terms that designate grammatical words are closed-class words and function words.

The meanings of grammatical words can be said to be structural and systematic, rather than referential and idiosyncratic. These meanings are the “glue”, as it were, that helps us express and understand the meaning relationships between lexical words. Four classes of grammatical words are usually described for English. These are determiners (Det), pronouns (P), conjunctions (C) and prepositions (P), as follows.

Determiner (Det)

Determiners can precede both N and Adj: this cow and this large cow are both well-formed in English, where this is a determiner. A frame for Det might then be, where the brackets indicate an optional word:

(Adj) N

This frame identifies words like the, a, these, my, your, both, as determiners.

Pronoun (Pr)

Pronouns can replace sequences of an optional determiner, followed by an optional adjective, followed by a noun. Using the symbol ≈ to indicate distributional equivalence, we can formalise the distribution of pronouns in this way:

(Det) (Adj) N ≈ Pr

In the three sentences in (3.6), the word sequences in italics can all be replaced by a word like they, identifying this word as a pronoun:

(5.6)

Those black cats are so annoying.

Black cats are so annoying.

Cats are so annoying.

Pronouns are interesting words, because they work by proxy, as it were. Hence their name, pro-nouns. Personal pronouns, for example, are used to replace direct reference to ourselves and our interlocutors. Instead of referring to ourselves and our conversation partners by name, we use pronouns. The pronoun I, for example, is used by speakers to refer to themselves, while the same speakers use you to refer to their listeners. When listeners in turn become speakers, they use the two words in exactly the same way. These are therefore called first person and second person pronouns, respectively – the speaker comes “first”. English has first person pronouns that have singular and plural forms, I to refer to the speaker only, and we to refer to a group including the speaker. In contrast, the English second person pronoun you has the same form to refer to one or more than one interlocutor. Third person pronouns refer to what the conversation is about. In English, these pronouns have three forms for the singular, he, she and it, the first two usually referring to sexed beings, and the latter to inanimate referents or beings whose sex is irrelevant or unknown. The plural form is the same for all three, they.

Other pronouns are also used in relation to the participants in an exchange. Possessive pronouns (e.g. his, hers, mine, theirs, yours) indicate whether something belongs to or is a characteristic of those participants. Demonstrative pronouns (e.g. this, those) show the distance between the speaker and the referent that is being talked about. Take, for example, the sentence:

(5.7)

These are yours.

This sentence contains two pronouns, these and yours. The first is demonstrative, and signals a referent that is near the speaker. (In contrast, the pronoun those signals a referent further away from the speaker.) The second pronoun is possessive, indicating that the listener owns whatever the speaker is referring to.

Conjunction (Conj)

Conjunctions are linking words, “conjoining” other words or phrases in order to enable multiple occurrences of the same word class or phrase. Conjunctions link units that are of the same type, e.g. an adjective with an adjective or a pronoun with a pronoun (section 7.5 deals with conjunctions in greater detail). In these two examples, the italicised conjunction and joins two pronouns in the first sentence, and two sequences of Adv Adj in the second sentence:

(5.8)

You and I need to talk seriously.

My cat is very beautiful and very stupid.

Preposition (P)

Prepositions are linking words that typically show relationships of space and time between other words or phrases. They are followed by (Det) (Adj) N sequences, or by pronouns, which replace these sequences. The distributional frames for a preposition are:

(Det) (Adj) N Pr

These frames identify words like in, under, despite, through, as prepositions. The meanings expressed by prepositions can be referential, like those of lexical words. For example, the word under regularly means a location tucked below something on a higher level in space. Or a preposition like during typically refers to a period of time. Other prepositional meanings are not fully lexical. For example, a word like in does not mean anything that can be usefully generalised from uses like in the house, in a moment, in conclusion, in fact, in neat rows, in Swahili. Similarly to the problems raised in the classification of adverbs, discussed above, these observations about prepositional meanings raise other problems for our analytical framework. In this case, we may question the adequacy of a watertight distinction between “lexical” and “grammatical” word meanings, that leaves prepositional meanings scattered between both.

Once particular words have been safely assigned a word class, we can use those words as shortcut tests of the class of other words. This is the substitution criterion. By this criterion, any word that can replace the noun cow in contexts where cow is found is also a noun. The same principle applies to the other word classes.

Here is a summary of the word classes discussed in this chapter.

Figure 5.1. Summary of word classes

And here is one example of a sentence containing all eight word classes:

Morphemes

We saw above that words like handbag and karaoke-singers may contain words, each of which is meaningful in its own right. We also find other words that contain “parts” of words, to which we feel that we must assign meaning too. For example, the word repaint means something like ‘to paint again’. We therefore observe that the word part re- adds some meaning of repetition to the meaning of the verb paint. Similarly, the final -s in the word houses adds the meaning ‘more than one’ to the noun house, i.e. it builds a plural noun. Forms like re- or -s are clearly meaningful, just like cat and house are meaningful but, by our definitions of “word” in section 5.2 above, they cannot be said to be words of English.

On the other hand, many words of English cannot be split into smaller units: cat and house are examples. The same is true of the word parts re- and -s. In order to account for the common properties of linguistic units like cat as well as re-, we need the concept of ‘a meaningful unit that contains no smaller meaningful units’. This concept is traditionally labelled a morpheme, duly defined as a minimal unit of meaning, i.e. the smallest meaningful unit in a language. By this definition, the words cat and house contain one morpheme each, as do the forms re- and -s, and words like repaint and handbag contain two morphemes each. By the same definition, two working assumptions follow:

• Any word consists of at least one morpheme, given that words express meaning, and morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language.
• Any morpheme must contribute meaning to the overall meaning of the word of which it is a part.

Morphemes are therefore compositional units of meaning. That is, words must be exhaustively broken up into morphemes. Let’s practise with a few examples.

We immediately observe that, as predicted, it is meaning, not spelling, that provides the guidelines for morpheme analysis. If spelling mattered, we would be justified in splitting the word caterpillar into cater and pillar, two well-formed words of English. The point is that neither cater nor pillar contribute to the meaning of caterpillar – nor does cater- in caterpillar sound like the word cater.

Similarly, the word carpet, which may sound like the words car and pet pronounced in sequence, does not obviously mean something like ‘a pet to be kept in a car’. That is, the meaning of carpet has nothing to do with cars or pets: carpet contains one morpheme only.

In contrast, the word unhappier clearly contains three morphemes, un-, happy, and –er. Note that, as usual, we are concerned with sound, not spelling: spelling happy with ‘y’ or ‘i’ is irrelevant for our analysis. All three morphemes contribute to the meaning of this word. The meaning of happy is part of the meaning of unhappier, un– contributes the negative meaning of the word, and – er contributes its comparative meaning, as discussed above for the word class Adjective.

On the pattern of unhappier, we might want to split uncle into un- and cle. This is clearly wrong, in that cle is meaningless in English and therefore not a morpheme. It follows that un- is not a morpheme either in this word, because un- cannot be contributing meaning to something that is itself meaningless. We then conclude that the word uncle contains one morpheme only.

Finally, the word cat-food contains two morphemes, that happen to be represented in writing with a hyphen in between (which is not the case in e.g. handbag). The meanings ‘cat’ and ‘food’ are part of the meaning of the word cat-food (just like the meanings ‘hand’ and ‘bag’ are part of the meaning of the word handbag).

Depending on the number of morphemes that they contain, words can be classified as:

• Simple words, that contain one morpheme only. For example, clever, chimpanzee, a, from, the, mother.

• Complex words, that contain more than one morpheme. For example, establishment, impressive, kindness, karaoke-singers.

Depending on their patterning, morphemes can in turn be classified as:

• Free forms, that are themselves words of the language. For example, in, of, a, berry, intelligent, hand, bag.
• Bound forms, that always occur as part of a word. For example, re-, un-, -ly, -ness, -ish.

Section 6.3.2 in the next chapter provides a schematic summary of different types of words according to their morphology.

Morphemes and morphs

Morphemes are abstract entities. They are constructs that we assume to exist in the system of a language, to help us describe features of that language.

Morphemes cannot therefore be spoken or heard. What can be spoken and heard is the concrete pronunciation of each morpheme, that we call a morph. To clarify this distinction between abstract concepts and their concrete realisations, let’s discuss something that we all understand very well: food.

Supposing you’ve eaten chilli crab before, and we ask you: “Do you like chilli crab?”, you may answer yes or no. Let’s take a look at what went on in your head when you read this question. Whatever your reaction to this dish, you thought of “chilli crab” as the generic name of a dish. You did not think of any individual crab cooked in chilli. Similarly, whether you love or hate classical opera, you don’t love or hate one particular opera but the generic type of music called “classical opera”. In other words, you have in your head generic concepts of chilli crab and classical opera.

Generic concepts are abstract entities: they are ideas that live in your mind. These ideas, however, are based on your concrete experience of, for example, chilli crab in real life: you’ve tasted it, and formed an opinion about it. The same is true of morphemes and morphs. Just like your different experiences of chilli crab helped you form the abstract concept of it, so our different experiences with hearing language spoken around us help us form abstract concepts about its units. We all pronounce and hear things differently, because we are all individuals. But we are all able to recognise the same units, no matter how differently pronounced they may be. For example, the song Happy Birthday to You is always the same song whether we, you, your neighbours or the National Chamber Choir sing it. Despite different renditions of it, we still recognise it as the song Happy Birthday to You. Similarly, the morpheme {banana} remains the morpheme {banana} whether you or someone else says it, whether we yell it or whisper it, and whether you say it in good health or with a badly blocked nose (in print, morphemes are usually represented between curly brackets, as we show here).

Since we are dealing with spoken language, let’s see how these notions of concrete difference versus abstract “sameness” apply to the pronunciation of morphemes. Some morphemes are always pronounced in the same way, e.g. {un-}, {happy} and {-er}. However, the pronunciation of other morphemes sometimes varies, and we need to understand why this is so.

We said above that you could work out your own distribution by noting down all the places where you can be found. Supposing that you are a student with a keen interest in swimming and basketball, it is likely that we will find you at school, at the pool and in a basketball court. But this also means that you will look different in these three places, not least because you will be dressed in a way that is appropriate to each environment. Nevertheless, the way you dress is not central to your identity: you, in swimming gear, basketball kit or city clothes, are still the same person, not three different people. In other words, we would be able to recognise you as ‘you’ regardless of the way you actually look in these different contexts that are part of your distribution, because we know that your dress depends on the particular context where you happen to be at different times. The same is true of some linguistic units: they also dress appropriately to their contexts, as it were, and therefore look different despite being the same unit. Let’s check with some data:

(5.9)

We observe that there is one word, an, preceding the nouns in Set 1, and a different word, a, preceding the nouns in Set 2. Before dismissing this puzzle as a random quirk of English, we may instead try to find a reason for it. Knowing now that context plays role in linguistic analysis, we reason that the cause of variation may lie in some difference in the units that follow the forms a and an. The preceding context cannot provide any explanation, because it is the same: in both cases there is nothing, i.e. there is silence. We observe that the words following an in Set 1 all begin with a vowel (usually spelt with the letters a, e, i, o, u), and those following a in Set 2 all begin with a consonant.

We can then conclude two things. First, that the reason for the observed variation in form must be that the immediate context of each form is a vowel or a consonant, respectively; and second, that the two forms an and a must therefore represent two variants of one same unit, not two different units. They are two morphs of the same morpheme. We may now give the morpheme any label of our choice. Traditionally, as you may know, the label for this morpheme is {indefinite article}.

Criteria to identify morphemes

Given that certain morphemes always have the same morph, whereas others have different morphs, how do we know that we are dealing, at all times, with “the same” morpheme? Three criteria help us decide.

• Sound. A morpheme either has a constant pronunciation, or its pronunciation is predictable from its context. The morpheme {cat} is pronounced in the same way regardless of context, whereas the pronunciation of the morpheme {indefinite article} as an or a varies according to the context in which it occurs and can be predicted from it.
• Grammar. A morpheme regularly patterns with the same type of units. The morpheme re– in the word repaint consistently precedes verbs. The morpheme {indefinite article} can precede nouns or adjectives.
• Meaning. A morpheme has a constant meaning. The morpheme re- in repaint always means repetition of the action indicated by the verb, and the meaning of an vs. a remains the same, regardless of form.

The first observation is that all forms spelt er are pronounced in the same way. In case all of them are found to be a morpheme, or the same morpheme, they therefore obey the sound criterion.

The best way to make sense of the two remaining criteria is to paraphrase the meaning of each word. A paraphrase uses different words to give the same meaning, describing it as clearly as possible. So what is a singer? The meaning of singer can be paraphrased as ‘someone who sings’. By using the verb sing in the paraphrase we immediately realise three things that will help us solve our puzzle: one, the word singer contains the morpheme sing; two, this morpheme is a verb; and three, -er must be a morpheme too, because singer and sing are both meaningful words and they mean different things. We have thus found out that in the word singer, -er contributes the meaning ‘someone who sings’, i.e. ‘someone who does the action represented by the verb’. The form -er is therefore attached to a verb. We can find a similar patterning in the word baker, where the verb bake plus the form -er also mean ‘someone who does the action represented by the verb’. The criteria of meaning and grammar are therefore satisfied: -er is the same morpheme in both words.

In the word potter, however, -er contributes a different meaning: pot can be a noun or a verb, but even taking it as a verb, the word potter does not mean ‘someone who pots’. It means ‘someone who makes pots’, where pots is a noun. The morpheme -er is therefore a different morpheme in this word, first because it attaches to a noun, and second because it gives the meaning ‘someone who makes the objects represented by the noun’ to the word potter.

The words louder and greater, in turn, show another pattern: -er attaches to an adjective, contributing the comparative meaning ‘more of the quality expressed by the adjective’. The word oyster clearly contains one morpheme only: oyst is meaningless, and so is er, in this word.

We then conclude that the data show examples of three different morphemes, that all happen to be pronounced in the same way. There is one –er morpheme attaching to verbs, with the shorthand meaning ‘someone who Verbs’ (or shorter still, ‘someone who Vs’), another –er morpheme attaching to nouns, meaning ‘someone who makes N’, and a third –er morpheme attaching to adjectives, meaning ‘more Adj’.

One reminder: our linguistic analysis concerns spoken language, i.e. speech. Discrepancies in spelling like sing-singer vs. bake-bak(e)r should be disregarded throughout this book. Both sing and bake end in a consonant sound, despite their spellings.

“Meaningless” morphemes?

The meaning compositionality of certain words is a matter of controversy. How many morphemes would you count in words like strawberry or ladybird?

The morphemes straw, berry, lady and bird exist in English, but they do not contribute any meaning to these two words that they apparently form. True, a strawberry is a berry, but how do we fit the meaning of straw into the overall meaning of the word strawberry? By the approach taken in this chapter, morphemes are compositional units of meaning. This entails that if we cannot assign compositional meaning to word parts, even if those word parts are words of the language in their own right, with clear meanings, then we must conclude that those word parts are not morphemes.

A similar problem arises with words like gooseberry and cranberry. The first part of these berry words, although non-compositional (or simply meaningless, like *cran), nevertheless appears to serve the function of distinguishing one type of berry from another. This may be so, but the assumptions that we made for morpheme analysis concern the meaning of morphemes, not their distinctive function in words. We are thus forced to analyse berry words like these as simple words, and to do the same for words like ladybird or butterfly. The word cranberry, incidentally, gained fame in morphological analysis because it became the technical term for words like itself: the apparently meaningless word parts of words that appear to contain one other genuine morpheme are called cranberry morphemes.

As in our earlier discussion of adverbs, here too we see that particular analytical frameworks, which necessarily include assumptions, sometimes leave our analyses with several loose ends. Alternative frameworks, with different assumptions, will reach different conclusions. This is as true, and as natural, in the science of language as in other sciences: physicists, for example, are also divided about whether it makes more sense to talk about light as consisting of waves or of particles, to mention just one of many controversies in physics. This is where the controversy lies: in any science, controversy simply means different ways of looking at the same things. Following the assumptions introduced in this chapter, we next look at how morphemes combine in different ways to form different types of words.

Food for thought

Why English is so hard to learn

We must polish the Polish furniture.

He could lead if he would get the lead out. The farmer used to produce produce.

The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse. The soldier decided to desert in the desert.

This was a good time to present the present.

A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum. When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

I did not object to the object.

The insurance was invalid for the invalid. The bandage was wound around the wound.

There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row. They were too close to the door to close it.

The buck does funny things when the does are present. They sent a sewer down to stitch the tear in the sewer line. To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow. The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

After a number of injections my jaw got number. Upon seeing the tear in my clothes I shed a tear. I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Further reading

Deterding, David H. and Poedjosoedarmo, Gloria R. (2001). Chapter 3. Word classes. In The grammar of English. Morphology and syntax for English teachers in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Prentice Hall, pp. 18-35.

Hudson, Grover (2000). Chapter 4. Morphemes. In Essential introductory linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 57-68.

Reference

Sapir, Edward (1921). Language. An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Attribution

This chapter has been modified and adapted from The Language of Language. A Linguistics Course for Starters under a CC BY 4.0 license. All modifications are those of Régine Pellicer and are not reflective of the original authors.