morphemebymorpheme

Morpheme-by-morpheme (MBM) is a linguistic framework for analyzing words as sequences of morphemes. In MBM, each morpheme is examined for form, function, semantics, and history, with the aim of understanding how units combine to produce a word and its inflected or derived forms. The approach emphasizes granular segmentation rather than treating the word as a single unit.

Methodology: MBM begins with segmentation of a word into morphemes, including bound affixes, roots, and clitics. Each segment is labeled with a cross-linguistically comparable gloss and grammatical category. Analysts record allomorphy and morphophonemic context and map correspondences across related forms, enabling cross-language comparison at the morpheme level.

Applications: MBM informs language documentation, lexicography, and computational linguistics. It supports morphological parsers, rule-based grammars, and annotation schemes by providing explicit morpheme inventories. In historical linguistics, MBM clarifies semantic shifts and affixation patterns; in pedagogy, it helps learners see how words are built from parts.

Example: unbelievable can be segmented as un- + believe + -able. An MBM analysis notes that un- signals negation, -able signals modality, and believe provides the semantic core, with phonological adjustments such as final-e loss before -able recorded as morphophonemic rules. Irregular forms and allomorphs are treated as properties of morphemes rather than exceptions to whole-word analysis.

Criticism: MBM can be labor-intensive and may over-segment, obscuring patterns at the lexeme level. Some languages present gradient, nonconcatenative, or clitic-dense morphology that challenges rigid morpheme-by-morpheme analysis.