ポッドキャストで言語学入門：「形態素ってなんですか？」

ELLO 言語学


さらに形態素の回も書き起こしてみました：

#16: 形態素ってなんですか？


■ Question: What is a morpheme?


■ Mr. Bergs: The morpheme is the smallest meaning-bearing units. So that's the unit that actually has the meaning in contrast to phoneme, which is only a meaning-differentiating, a meaning-distinguishing unit. So in English for instance we have some morphemes that carry the meaning of 'NOT' or negation. When you look at the items of words in "impossible" or "illogical" for instance, both in- and il- mean something like 'NOT' or negative. So "impossible" means "not-possible", "illogical" means "not-logical". So these two prefixes as we call them carry the meaning of 'NOT' for example. -ment means something like institution as in "government". So -ment has specific meaning. But we need to be careful here, because meaning can also be function for example. So in morphemes like the third person singular for instance, this -s does not have lexical meaning as such, but has grammatical function. So this -s in the end of "sings" for example means that it's third person, singular, indicative, present tense, simple, and so on. The -ed as in past tense "He danced" means basically preterite or past tense. So that's not lexical meaning as such, but only a grammatical function. So the morpheme is the smallest meaning-bearing unit of a language.

  • morpheme: 形態素
  • prefix: 接頭辞
  • lexical meaning: 語彙的意味
  • grammatical function: 文法的機能
  • preterite: 過去（≒past tense）


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