Morphemes

Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a word or sentence. In Blackfoot, words are often composed of many morphemes and they can therefore have very intricate meanings. An example is imitaikoaiks "puppies." This word has three morphemes, as follows:

imitaa 'dog' + -ikoan 'diminutive' (or 'tiny') + -iksi 'plural'

In Blackfoot and other languages in the world, we can separate morphemes into two broad categories: lexical and grammatical.

Lexical morphemes have "real-world" meanings that add to the richness of the word or sentence. Some of these morphemes are roots, which means they carry the main meaning in the word. In Blackfoot, there are noun roots and verb roots. Other lexical morphemes add extra descriptive information.

Grammatical morphemes provide the "glue" that holds the word or sentence together. They may add meanings like time (past), location (there), or who is involved (me, you, them). Grammatical morphemes are sometimes also called inflection.

In linguistic analyses of texts, lexical morphemes are usually in lowercase letters, and grammatical morphemes are in small caps and are abbreviated.

The inventory of lexical and grammatical morphemes in Blackfoot is immense! The Blackfoot Digital Dictionary is a good place to look for individual lexical morphemes, as well as morphemes in combination (i.e., in words).

The Grammar Page of the Blackfoot Digital Dictionary may also have useful information. If you want to read more about specific morphemes from a linguistic perspective, you can visit the Blackfoot Digital Dictionary's bibliography of academic publications on Blackfoot linguistics. If you want a linguist's help interpreting these publications, contact Otskapinaaki Heather Bliss.

The Mioohpokoiiksi project team is starting to compile a list of abbreviations used for grammatical morphemes that appear in the stories, conversations, and other resources we have created for this site. Click on the GoogleSheet below to access this (in-progress) list.