Editing Morphology (linguistics) (section)

===Morpheme-based morphology===
[[File:Independently morphology tree.png|200px|thumb|Morpheme-based morphology tree of the word "independently"]]
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of [[morpheme]]s. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as ''independently'', the morphemes are said to be ''in-'', ''de-'', ''pend'', ''-ent'', and ''-ly''; ''pend'' is the (bound) [[root (linguistics)|root]] and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.{{efn|The existence of words like ''appendix'' and ''pending'' in English does not mean that the English word ''depend'' is analyzed into a derivational prefix ''de-'' and a root ''pend''. While all those were indeed once related to each other by morphological rules, that was only the case in Latin, not in English. English borrowed such words from French and Latin but not the morphological rules that allowed Latin speakers to combine ''de-'' and the verb ''pendere'' 'to hang' into the derivative ''dependere''.}} In words such as ''dogs'', ''dog'' is the root and the ''-s'' is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest and most naïve form, this way of analyzing word forms, called "item-and-arrangement", treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other ("[[concatenation|concatenated]]") like beads on a string. More recent and sophisticated approaches, such as [[distributed morphology]], seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenated, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for item-and-arrangement theories and similar approaches.

Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms:{{sfn|Beard|1995}}
* [[Jan Baudouin de Courtenay|Baudouin]]'s "single morpheme" hypothesis: Roots and affixes have the same status as morphemes.
* [[Leonard Bloomfield|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: morphemes, affixes and roots alike are stored in the lexicon.

Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian{{sfn|Bloomfield|1933}} and one [[Charles F. Hockett|Hockettian]].{{sfn|Hockett|1947}} For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself.{{clarify|date=December 2013}} For Hockett, morphemes are "meaning elements", not "form elements". For him, there is a morpheme plural using allomorphs such as ''-s'', ''-en'' and ''-ren''. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, the two views are mixed in unsystematic ways so a writer may refer to "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme ''-s''" in the same sentence.