MORPHEME

in linguistics, the smallest grammatical unit of speech; it may be a word, like place or an, or an element of a word, like re- and -ed in reappeared. So-called isolating languages, such as Vietnamese, have a one-to-one correspondence of morphemes to words; i.e., no words contain more than one morpheme. Variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs; the ending -s, indicating plural in cats, dogs, the -es in dishes, and the -en of oxen are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme. The word talked is represented by two morphemes, talk and the past-tense morpheme, here indicated by -ed. The study of words and morphemes is included in morphology (q.v.).