Commonality and distinctiveness : towards a theory of morphemics

Abstract

This work is concerned with the nature of morphemes. It attempts to define and characterise 'morpheme', and provide practical tools for the analysis of morphemes. The work drew its instigation from the practical problems in morphology, in which the phonological and semantic relationships between morphological objects did not parallel the relationships between the roles of those objects in word formation. These relationships are to a large extent not identifiable or describable within the existing approaches to morphology. This work seeks to identify and describe these relationships as the relationships between morphemic entities. In other words, it focuses on morphemes as morphemes, rather than as the atoms of word formation, and seeks to characterise them from that perspective.