The term morphome refers to a function in linguistics which is purely morphological or has an irreducibly morphological component. The term is particularly used by

Martin Maiden Martin Maiden (born Southampton, UK, 20 May 1957) is Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He was educated at King Edward VI School, Southampton, and then at Trinity Hal ...

following

Mark Aronoff Mark Aronoff (), a native of Montreal, Quebec, is a morphologist and distinguished professor at Stony Brook University. The editor of ''Language'' from 1995 to 2001 and president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2005, he has been electe ...

's identification of morphomic functions and the morphomic level—a level of linguistic structure intermediate between and independent of

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

and syntax. In distinguishing this additional level, Aronoff makes the empirical claim that all mappings from the morphosyntactic level to the level of phonological realisation pass through the intermediate morphomic level.

Typology of morphomic patterns

Functions defined at the morphomic level are of many qualitatively different types. One example is the different ways the

perfect participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...

can be realised in English––sometimes, this form is created through suffixation, as in ''bitten'' and ''packed'', sometimes through a process of

ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...

, as in ''sung'', and sometimes through a combination of these, such as ''broken'', which uses ablaut as well as the suffix ''-n''. Another is the division of

lexemes A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken ...

into distinct inflectional classes. Inflectional classes present distinct morphological forms, but these distinctions bear no meaning beyond signalling inflectional patterns; they are internal to morphology, and thus morphomic. Martin Maiden's theory of morphomes has been mostly developed with regard to the Romance languages, where he identified many examples of morphomic stem distributions. A different typology of morphomic patterns has been put forth by Erich Round. He distinguishes rhizomorphomes, which are a property of roots (corresponding to the traditional notion of inflectional class), metamorphomes, which are a property of paradigms, a set of cells which behave in a particular way (corresponding to the morphome in Maiden's terms, such as patterns of stem distribution), and meromorphomes, which are a property of exponents, and have only been identified for now in Kayardild and related languages.

Typology of morphomic patterns

References

Further reading