What is the smallest unit of language that has meaning?

• A. Morpheme
• B. Phoneme
• C. Lexeme
• D. Allomorph

Answer: (A)

Meaning in language is built from small meaning-bearing units called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit that carries either semantic content or a grammatical function. For example, in cats, there are two morphemes: cat, which has the core meaning of the animal, and the plural suffix that marks more than one. That plural ending is itself a morpheme, even though it can surface in different sounds (s, z, ɪz); those sound variants are allomorphs of the same morpheme. By contrast, phonemes are the smallest sound units that distinguish words but don’t carry meaning by themselves, and a lexeme is the dictionary form of a word, which groups all its inflected forms under one meaning. So the smallest unit with meaning is the morpheme.