FTCE Professional Education Practice Exam

What is the smallest unit of meaning when considering a word's components?

1. Phoneme

2. Morpheme

3. Lexicon

4. Pragmatics

The correct answer is: Morpheme

Morphemes are indeed the smallest units of meaning in language. They can be whole words or parts of words, such as prefixes or suffixes, that contribute to a word's overall meaning. For example, the word "unhappiness" consists of three morphemes: "un-" (a prefix meaning "not"), "happy" (the root word), and "-ness" (a suffix that turns an adjective into a noun). Understanding morphemes helps in analyzing how words are constructed and how their meanings can change based on the addition or alteration of these components. Phonemes, by contrast, are the smallest units of sound in a language that distinguish one word from another, but they do not carry meaning by themselves. Lexicon refers to the complete set of meaningful units in a language, including morphemes, but it is not a single unit itself. Pragmatics involves the context and usage of language in social situations and does not pertain to the structural components of a word. Thus, morphemes are fundamental to understanding word formation and meaning in the study of linguistics.