A content morpheme or contentive morpheme is a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word. Content

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

s have lexical denotations that are not dependent on the context or on other morphemes. For instance, in English, the abstract

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

''beauty'' (already a fused form with an incorporated suffix) may mean 'pleasing quality'. Adding the causative verbal suffix ''-fy'' (a functional morpheme) produces the verb ''beautify'' 'to make pleasing'. By adding the suffix ''-ful'' (another functional morpheme), the

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

''beautiful'' is formed. Further adding the adverbializer ''-ly'' (yet another functional morpheme) produces the

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ...

''beautifully''. The various functional morphemes surrounding the semantic core are able to modify the use of the root through derivation, but do not alter the lexical denotation of the root as somehow 'pleasing' or 'satisfying'. Most or all major class words include at least one content morpheme; compounds may contain two or more content morphemes. In addition to content morphemes, major class words frequently (but not obligatorily) include one or more functional morphemes affixed to the root(s). Some languages, such as Kharia, can be analyzed as having a single major word class composed of semantic bases or content morphemes. Thus, the distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives in such languages is entirely morphological (realized through the concatenation of functional morphemes), rather than lexical (having separate entries in the lexicon for each of the major word classes).

References

{{reflist Morphemes