Find meaningful word parts with evidence
Before you begin: No formal grammar knowledge needed. Work with the English examples here before comparing another language.
A morpheme is a minimal unit associated with meaning or grammatical function. A root supplies the central lexical material; an affix attaches to another form. A prefix comes before its base and a suffix after it. A repeated sequence is not automatically a morpheme: it must have evidence of a recurring function.
Inflection supplies grammatical information such as number. Derivation forms a new lexical item, sometimes changing its category. Both involve structure, and neither can be identified from length alone.
Worked example & observations
Original mini-dataset: paint, paints, painter, painters; clean, cleans, cleaner, cleaners. In the person-noun reading, painter is paint + -er and painters adds plural -s. The examples support a person-noun pattern, but ‘cleaner’ can also mean ‘more clean’. Ask for a sentence before choosing an analysis. Word structure and meaning constrain one another.
Your turn
Analyse ‘repainted’ into a repeat-action prefix, base and past-tense suffix. Does the beginning of ‘red’ establish the same prefix?
Show answer and reasoning
For the past-tense reading: re- + paint + -ed. The verb ‘paint’ is repeated and placed in the past. ‘Red’ does not contain the productive repeat-action prefix merely because its first two letters match. There is no remaining base ‘d’ with the required function.
Watch for: A morpheme is not necessarily a syllable. Also distinguish an analysis of present-day speakers’ patterns from the historical origin of a word.
Published and planned
Published: this starter lesson, worked example and exercise with an answer.
Planned: Constituents, agreement, scope, ambiguity and pragmatics, with language-specific comparisons.
Validation: source review and mathematical checks where applicable. Photography captures, audio listening and device workflows have not been performed for these lessons. Synthetic cases are labelled; no personal media or field observations are implied.
References
Original AUWEN teaching and examples. Sources reviewed 14 September 2026.
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