What is the smallest meaningful unit of language, such as a word, prefix, or suffix?

• A. The smallest meaningful unit of language (word, prefix or suffix)
• B. A phoneme that differentiates word meaning
• C. The set of sounds in a language
• D. A sentence's emotional tone

Answer: (A)

In language, the smallest unit that carries meaning is a morpheme. Morphemes can stand alone as words (free morphemes) like book or happy, or they can attach to a base to modify meaning (bound morphemes) such as prefixes and suffixes like un- or -ness. For example, the word unhappiness contains three morphemes: un- (a negating prefix), happy (a free morpheme), and -ness (a suffix indicating a state). This shows how meaning is built from these small units: some are whole words, others are affixes that change or extend meaning. By contrast, phonemes are the smallest sound units that can differentiate words but don’t carry meaning by themselves, and the set of sounds in a language belongs to phonology, not a unit of meaning. Emotional tone relates to prosody, not to the basic building blocks of meaning.