Morphemekre

In this article, morphemekre is presented as a hypothetical linguistic framework for analyzing morpheme boundaries across languages. The term combines "morpheme" with a suffix-like element to denote a cross-linguistic approach to morphology, phonology, and syntax. It is not tied to a specific language but serves as a general analytic concept.

Core ideas include separating segmentation from morphophonological changes, representing words as sequences of morphemes with explicit boundaries, and accommodating hierarchical or overlapping structure. The framework also emphasizes alignment with corpus annotation and computational morphology, aiming to provide consistent guidelines for cross-linguistic morpheme analysis.

Examples help illustrate the approach. In English, unhappiness can be segmented as un- + happy + -ness. A morphemekre analysis would highlight the boundary positions and potential allomorphy at those boundaries rather than treating the word as a single unanalyzed form, supporting comparative and computational work.

Applications and limitations. Morphemekre has been proposed for use in natural language processing, especially in morphological parsing, lexicon design, and language documentation projects. It is well suited to concatenative morphology but faces challenges with non-concatenative systems, such as Semitic root-and-pattern morphology, as well as with phenomena like suppletion or cliticized material where boundaries are less discrete.

See also: Morphology, Morpheme, Morphosyntax, Computational linguistics.