Concept in Definition ABC
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Javier Navarro, in Aug. 2018
The words that form a language they have two closely linked aspects: their signified and their signifier. The first refers to the idea associated with each word and the second to its internal structure.
Division of the monemes
Monemes are the basic elements of words with their own meaning. Thus, the letters are basic elements, but they lack notion by themselves. Monemes are divided into two groups: lexemes and morphemes. The former constitute the root of each word and, therefore, provide a meaning (for example, in the term cat, gat would be the lexeme).
Morphemes are those that complement or modify the meaning of lexemes and by themselves do not have meaning (in the previous example, the morpheme "a" serves as a complement to the lexeme "gat", since it tells us that the animal is from gender feminine).
Although morphemes have no meaning, they are important because they convey relevant information. A morpheme tells us if a word is singular, plural, masculine or feminine. On the other hand, there are free or linked morphemes. The former form a word on their own, while the latter have to join other morphemes to form words.
On synthesis, the lexeme is always the root of a word or, in other words, the nucleus of its definition (words like bookstore, bookseller or bookish have a part that is not modified and remains unchanged and that part is the lexeme). The other monemes, the morphemes, complement the lexemes.
From sound to spelling
To the margin of lexemes and morphemes, the letters that make up the words form sounds, which are known as phonemes. In each language the different letters have a specific sound. In Spanish, phonemes are divided into vowels and consonants. When these phonemes are combined and translated into the writing they become monemes.
Morphology is the linguistic discipline that studies words and their internal structure
The term morphology It comes from the Greek, specifically from morphe, which means form, and from logos, which means study or knowledge.
The set of all the words are presented in different modalities or types: lexical and grammatical.
The lexicons are divided into the following: nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs (all of them present a contents referring to specific things or ideas).
The words of grammatical type are: pronouns, articles, conjunctions and prepositions (the meaning of them does not refer to objects or properties themselves, but depends on the context of the language).
Photo: Fotolia - bayuprahara
Topics in Monema