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So let’s talk about words. Now, you probably think that words are one of the biggest things
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a linguist could care about. After all, words are the little Lego pieces of language,
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right? You connect them together, and you suddenly have bigger meanings, whole sentences
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and conversations. That’s all true, but when it comes to the tiniest
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meaningful bits, we usually want to aim a little smaller than the word. I’m Moti Lieberman,
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and this is the Ling Space.
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So of course, since I’m a linguist, I love words. They’re amazing and cute, and they
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often sound really cool. But the thing is, when we want to look at meaning, words can
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just be too big. A single word can have a whole bunch of different meanings wrapped
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up inside it. So, just think about a word like “rekillable", as in “The Others are rekillable.”
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It might be one word, but inside, you can see three different pieces that have their
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own meanings – “re,” or do again; “kill”, so to cause to die; and “able,” or can
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be done. So when we put all the different meanings together, we get something like “can be killed again”.
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That’s one word, but it’s got three different pieces of meaning inside.
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So if we really want to talk about meaning, we need to dig down past the word level and look at
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the different parts inside the word. We need to make it down to where we can’t go any farther
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without breaking up the raw ore of meaning. When we’ve removed everything extraneous,
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and all that we're left with are sets of sounds that are paired up with one individual meaning
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each, we’ve hit the bottom.
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Then we’ve managed to find the morpheme. A morpheme is the smallest pairing between
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sound and meaning. So that means if you split off any more of the sound, you
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wouldn’t keep the same meaning anymore. Something like “Stark” is a morpheme
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by itself, because even if you can see another morpheme like “star” inside it, you can’t
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cut off that [k] without changing meaning. That [k] is an essential
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part of Starkness; without it, you’ve ended up with something completely different. Starks
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aren’t stars.
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Now, this goes the other way, too. Just because you can put some sounds together doesn’t
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mean that they make up a morpheme. There has to be a meaning attached to those sounds, too. So
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in the Stark example from before, another reason you can’t cut off that [k]
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is that [k] doesn’t even mean anything in English. So you can't just attach
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it as its own morpheme to something else.
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Or take something like “khaleesi .” Now, that’s a perfectly fine combination of sounds right
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there, and any English speaker will tell you that’s an okay word, even if they don’t
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necessarily know what it means. But it’s not until you pair that sound with a meaning that
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it becomes a morpheme. If you said khaleesi in 1995, that wouldn’t have been a morpheme,
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because it didn't mean anything.
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But now, a lot of people know what that is – the sounds have been paired with a meaning,
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and voila! A morpheme is born.
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Not all morphemes are the same, of course. There are a few distinctions between different
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kinds of morphemes that should just jump out at you. The one we’ll talk about this week
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is that some morphemes can stand on their own, and other ones can’t. Let’s consider
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a word like “Tickler.” Now this word has two morphemes in it, “tickle” and “er”.
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The first part, “tickle”, can stand on its own, like “I’ll tickle the information
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out of him.” But that second part, “er”, can’t be by itself like that. It clearly
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has a meaning of its own – “someone that does… whatever thing it’s attached to”,
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so a tickler tickles and a hunter hunts, etc. But it needs that piece to attach to – if
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someone asks you what your job is, you can’t say “I’m an er.” It can’t be independent.
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Morphemes like “tickle” or “hound” or “red” that can stand on their own like
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that are known as free morphemes. They’re free-standing meaning bits, or at least, they
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can be. But things like “er” or “un” or “de”, those aren’t strong enough
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to stand by themselves. They need to attach to something, and so these are known as bound
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morphemes.
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But there’s no fundamental rule that says any morpheme, or even any type of morpheme, has
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to be free or bound in any given language. We can find free morphemes in English that are bound
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in other languages. Take “the” in English – now that’s a free morpheme, like in “the
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cat.” But in Hebrew, that “the” is bound – it’s the [ha] in [haxatul] - החתול.
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And we can find things that are bound in English that are free in other languages.
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So, how about the –er we use for comparison in English? Now, that’s bound, as in “It’s
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colder on the Wall.” But in Japanese, that comparative is its own word – it’s the [motto] in
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“kabe-ga motto samui desu.”
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Beyond these examples, there are languages where basically every morpheme is free,
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like Mandarin or Vietnamese. These languages don’t really have bound morphemes at all. Other
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languages, like Mi’qmaq or Mohawk, basically have all their morphemes bound. These
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are languages where an entire sentence gets rolled up together into a single word.
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So a sentence like “She made the thing that one puts on one’s body ugly for him” is just
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a single word in Mohawk , like this: wahuwajaʔdawitsherahetkʌ:ʔdʌʔ.
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Linguistic example sentences can get pretty wacky sometimes!
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But this is why we can have such a hard time talking about words in linguistics. Something that's just
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one word in English could turn into a few words in a different language, and something that's a whole sentence
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in English could be a single word somewhere else. What’s free and what’s bound are
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different from one language to the next, but no matter what language you look at, morphemes
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are always there. And that's why that’s where it’s most meaningful to look.
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So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you were able to associate
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my sounds with meanings, you learned that morphemes are the pairings of sounds and meaning
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that can’t be broken up further without losing the meaning; that there are free morphemes
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that can stand on their own, and bound morphemes that need to be attached to something to be
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used; that languages make up their own minds about what should be bound and free; and that
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because of the variation, talking about morphemes can be more appropriate than talking about
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words.
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The Ling Space is written and produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Élise
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Prévost, our production assistant is Georges Coulombe, music and sound design is by Shane
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Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you
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can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra material on this
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topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own
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personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Huitou jian!