05-10-2016, 05:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-10-2016, 05:05 PM by ThomasCoon.)
Sam G wrote:I don't think it's so obvious what's a morpheme and what isn't. For instance, in English, "faster" can be broken into "fast" and "er", "singer" can be broken into "sing" and "er", but "lumber" can't be broken into "lumb" and "er" - it's just one morpheme, "lumber". That words in the VMS can be divided into subunits that recur in many different words does not necessarily mean that these subunits constitute affixes or morphemes in a grammatical sense (although I suspect that they do in many cases).
I agree with Sam G - this was exactly my thought also. As David pointed out, "morpheme" means "unit that bears meaning" - but since we don't know that these bigrams / ngrams bear grammatical meaning (there are alternatives as Sam pointed out), we could easily be wrong saying that they are morphemes.