A content morpheme or contentive morpheme is a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word. Content

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

s have lexical denotations that are not dependent on the context or on other morphemes. For instance, in English, the abstract

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...

''beauty'' (already a fused form with an incorporated suffix) may mean 'pleasing quality'. Adding the causative verbal suffix ''-fy'' (a functional morpheme) produces the verb ''beautify'' 'to make pleasing'. By adding the suffix ''-ful'' (another functional morpheme), the

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...

''beautiful'' is formed. Further adding the adverbializer ''-ly'' (yet another functional morpheme) produces the

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...

''beautifully''. The various functional morphemes surrounding the semantic core are able to modify the use of the root through derivation, but do not alter the lexical denotation of the root as somehow 'pleasing' or 'satisfying'. Most or all major class words include at least one content morpheme; compounds may contain two or more content morphemes. In addition to content morphemes, major class words frequently (but not obligatorily) include one or more functional morphemes affixed to the root(s). Some languages, such as Kharia, can be analyzed as having a single major word class composed of semantic bases or content morphemes. Thus, the distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives in such languages is entirely morphological (realized through the concatenation of functional morphemes), rather than lexical (having separate entries in the lexicon for each of the major word classes).

References

{{reflist Units of linguistic morphology