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Two additional remarks are necessary here: (1) Two or more
morphemes may sound the same but be basically different, that is, they may
be
homonyms
. Thus the
-er
morpheme indicating the doer of an action as in
writer
has a homonym — the morpheme
-er
denoting the comparative
degree
of adjectives and adverbs, as in
longer.
Which of the two
homonymous morphemes is actually there in a given case can of course only
be determined by examining the other morphemes in the word. Thus, the
morpheme
-er
in our first example,
writer,
cannot possibly be the morpheme
of
the comparative degree, as the morpheme
writ-
to which it is joined on is
not the stem of an adjective or adverb, and so
no comparative degree is to
be thought of here.
(2) There may be
zero morphemes
, that is, the absence of a
morpheme may indicate a certain meaning. Thus,
if we compare the forms
book
and
books,
both derived from the stem
book-,
we may say that while
books
is characterised by the
-s
-morpheme as being
a plural form,
book
is
characterised by the zero morpheme as being a singular form.
In grammar, we are of course concerned with the grammatical, or
structural, meaning of morphemes: we do not here study the meanings of root
morphemes, which are necessarily lexical, and as to
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