morfeemiline

Morfeemiline is a theoretical construct in morphology and morphosyntax used to describe and visualize the sequential arrangement of morphemes within a word. It conceptualizes a word as a linear string of morphemes ordered by grammatical function, from root to inflectional and derivational affixes, and is employed to analyze morphotactics and cross-language affix ordering.

The term is formed from morpheme and line, and has appeared in linguistic discussions as a way to represent morpheme boundaries and their functional roles in a one-dimensional format. It is not a universal theory but one of several analytical tools used to compare languages.

In practice, a morfeemiline assigns sequential positions along a line to each morpheme, labels their features (such as part of speech, tense, number, mood), and encodes dependencies or hierarchies that influence surface form. The representation can be aligned with phonological realization, illustrating how allomorphy and phonotactics interact with morpheme order. It is commonly used in annotated corpora and pedagogical descriptions of morphologically rich languages.

Advantages include intuitive visualization, ease of algorithmic parsing, and straightforward cross-language comparisons of affix order. Limitations involve potential oversimplification of non-concatenative morphology or clitic clusters, difficulties representing non-linear morphologies, and reliance on clear morpheme segmentation. Critics argue that a one-dimensional line may not capture all interactions present in words with complex morphology, but proponents view it as a useful complement to hierarchical analyses.

See also: morpheme, morphology, morphosyntax, morpheme order constraints, agglutinative languages.