Morpheme-based morphology
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Morpheme-based morphology is a view on morphology with the following three basic axioms:
- Baudoin’s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the same status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES.
- Bloomfield’s SIGN BASE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.
- Bloomfield’s LEXICAL MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: The morphemes, affixes and roots alike, are stored in the lexicon.
Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian.
[edit] The Bloomfieldian tradition
For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but it was not meaning itself.
| Level | Lexical form | Grammatical form |
|---|---|---|
| minimal signalling units | phonetic form | tactic form |
| form without meaning | phoneme | taxemes |
| form with meaning | morpheme | tagmeme |
| meaning | sememe | episememe |
[edit] The Hockettian tradition
For Hockett, morphemes are meaning elements, not form elements. For him, there is a morpheme plural, with the allomorphs -s, -en, -ren etc.
[edit] Later traditions
Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, these two views are mixed in unsystematic ways, so that a writer may talk about "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s" in the same sentence, although these are different things.
