cranberry morpheme

MORPHOLOGY: a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned a meaning nor a grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other. EXAMPLE: the English word cranberry seems morphologically complex, since it must be distinguished from words such as raspberry , blackberry , and gooseberry . Still, cran has no meaning and does not function as an independent word: cranberry is the only word in which cran appears. The existence of cranberry -morphemes plays a role in the discussion whether morphology is word based or morpheme based (e.g. Aronoff 1976).