To divide or not to divide?

we defined a morpheme as the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning. We have now looked at affixes and bases, both free and bound, and considered their meanings and how they combine into complex structures. We assume that affixes have meaning, but sometimes it’s not completely clear whether they do. Consider words like report, import, transport, deport, comport, and export. They certainly seem to be made up of pieces, but is it clear what these pieces mean? In fact, English has dozens of words that are similar to what we might call the -port family.

One reason for our dilemma in analyzing these forms is that they are not native to English. They were borrowed from Latin (or from French, which in turn is descended from Latin), where they did have clear meanings: -port comes from the verb portare ‘to carry’, -mit from the verb mittere ‘to send’, -scribe from the verb scribere ‘to write’, and so on. But English speakers (unless they’ve studied Latin!) don’t know this. Morphologists are left with an unsatisfying sense that the words above somehow ought to be treated as complex, but are nevertheless reluctant to give up the strict definition of morpheme.

Similar to these are word-pieces that are sometimes called cran morphs, from the word cranberry. The second part of the word cranberry is clearly a free morpheme. But when we break it off, what’s left is a piece that doesn’t seem to occur in other words (except in recent years, words like cranapple that are part of product names), and doesn’t seem to mean anything independently. There are quite a few of these cran morphs in the names of other types of berries: rasp- in raspberry, huckle- in huckleberry. In cases such as these we are even more tempted than we were with -port, -ceive, and the like to divide words into morphemes, even though we know that one part of the word isn’t meaningful in the way morphemes usually are.