In last week’s lecture we learned about simplex and complex. A simplex word is a word that cannot be broken down any further. A simplex word only has one morpheme. A complex word can be broken down further because it has two more morphemes in the word. For example, the words that were provided (Forbid. Forget, Forgive, Forgo, and Forswear) are all complex words. In the word forswear, you can break it down to for-swear. The words for-swear and all the other words, can stand alone and still have their own meaning. Like in the word for-give. The word for has its own meaning and also the word give has its own meaning. Now if you would look at a simplex word like the word eat that word can not be broken down any further because it has one meaning which is to eat. The word eat only has single morpheme unlike the word for-get.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.