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Questions On The Morpheme And Antibacterial

Satisfactory Essays

1. Explain what a morpheme is, and identify the morphemes in both "unbeliever" and "antibacterial."
a. A morpheme is a term used by descriptive linguists (scientists who study spoken languages), who specifically study morphology which studies how words consist of their meaningful parts (morphemes) and are formed through the combination of sounds (Kottak 65). An example of this type of study is seen in the word “unbeliever”, where there are three morphemes present, followed by their individual and collective meanings as follows: un- “not”, believe- “to accept something as true”, er- “a person or thing that is currently” or “is”. Each individual morpheme has a clear and separate meaning, and when combined, making the word unbeliever, creates the meaning of “a person who is not accepting something as true”. Another example of morphology can be seen in the world antibacterial, where the individual morphemes are as follows: anti- “to go against/fight” and bacteria- “unicellular organism that can cause disease”. If the morphemes are put together, then, antibacterial means, “to fight against unicellular organisms that can cause disease”.

Descriptive linguists combine morphology with other linguistic emphasis areas such as phonology to obtain a better understanding of how cultures have formed the grammatical and usage rules within their language structure, or in other words the culture’s semantics and syntax.
2. What is meant by the term "sociolinguistics"?
a. Sociolinguists are

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