Morphemehood
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The property of being a morpheme. uncountable
"Morphological features can only be posited for a substrate language if there is sufficient positive evidence, i.e. an alternation between non-inherited endings. "Morpheme-hood" should only be posited based on language-internal evidence, as positing suffix alternation on the basis of forms in different languages renders both the comparison of the forms and the identification of the suffix circular."
Example
More examples"Morphological features can only be posited for a substrate language if there is sufficient positive evidence, i.e. an alternation between non-inherited endings. "Morpheme-hood" should only be posited based on language-internal evidence, as positing suffix alternation on the basis of forms in different languages renders both the comparison of the forms and the identification of the suffix circular."
Etymology
From morpheme + -hood.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.