A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning
(語素 = 最小的語義單位). In Chinese, each character (漢字 = 書寫單位) usually represents one
morpheme (one basic meaning), such as 我家很遠woo jia heen yeuan (my home is far away).
There are two kinds of morphemes, free morphemes (independent words) and bound morphemes (parts of words; these
parts cannot be used alone). In 我家很遠(woo jia heen yeuan), the three underlined
characters represent free morphemes.
很 heen- is a bound morpheme
because it is not used alone. Look
at this dialog [In linguistics, * means that an example is wrong]:
Q:
你喜歡我嗎? (Do you like me? Very Very like)
A:
*很 OR *很喜 (*Very OR *Very like [very common mistake])
These are strange answers, aren't they? If
somebody asks you: 你喜歡我嗎? (Nii shiihuan woo .ma), you cannot answer 很 heen or 很喜 hen shii because 很and 喜 are bound morphemes.
How about:
Q:
你喜歡我嗎? (Do you like me?)
A:
很喜歡 (Yes, I like you very much)
很喜歡 is a good
answer because you have bound morphemes used with free morphemes.
In Chinese, each character is usually one morpheme,
but morphemes are not words. In English,
many short words, such as black (= a color), dog
(= an animal) and ever (= at any time) are also made of only one morpheme, but blacker,
dogs and never are each made of two morphemes:
blacker = black + -er,
dogs = dog
+ -s,
never = n- (not) + ever.
The underlined morphemes are free
morphemes. The morphemes in red are bound morphemes.
