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Talk:Free morpheme

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This sentence "Many languages of East Asia have free morphemes, but not bound ones, such as the Chinese languages, the Tai languages, and Vietnamese" is totally untrue. There are all manner of bound morphemes in these languages. In Chinese, the clear majority of characters in modern dictionaries have no free usage at all. Charmii (talk) 14:42, 26 September 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Charmii (talkcontribs) [reply]


Nic@cut.ac.za 12:09, 31 August 2006 (UTC)According to the definition of what a morpheme is, " the smallest dependant unit that has semantic value/meaning" a word, as such cannot be a morpheme. A morpheme is a word costruction entity, part of a word-formation process. A word, on the other hand has independant meaning and can be constructed to become a complex word, by means of adding (dependant) units, while this cannot be done to morphemes, e.g. "book" = a word, while "-s" is not = a word. In isolation a morpheme does not have meaning, but in conjunction to a word it becomes meaningful. So it cannot be said that a word is a "free morpheme", because all morphemes are "bound morphemes".[reply]

Candidate for merge

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Merge with Bound Morpheme - both are part of the same definition (this being an inverse of Bound Morphemes. A similar comment will be made in Unbounded Morpheme in the hope someone will combine these definitions!