how many morephemes does the word 'geese'represent?
Answers
Hi bro
enior Member
UK English
If a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning I can understand that ducks has two of them - one morpheme with the essence of duck and the other with the essence of plurality. If a morpheme is a string of letters then I can understand that ducks has two - duck and s. It's just fortuitous that the two results can be matched together. I have a problem with geese. I can't believe there is anything so fundamentally different between ducks and geese. I can eat both their eggs, they both like water and some even look the same. And, that makes me think that neither of the definitions for morpheme are correct.
Each of the words you mention has two morphemes, let’s say TEETH - {tooth} + {plural}. The plural morpheme has many allomorphs; there’s -s as in books, -en as in oxen, -i as in syllabi. Remember that when you put something in curly brackets {} to show that it’s a morpheme, you are saying what it means. You are not making any claim about what it sounds like.