"restaurant" has 1 or 2 morphemes?

Question

Morpheme: The smallest unit of meaning that a word can be divided into The word ‘like’ contains one morpheme but ‘un-like-ly’ contains three.Source

The word "restaurant"  /ˈres.tə.rɑːnt/ has 1 or 2 morphemes "res" & "taurant" ?

Why do I ask this question? 
It is because the voiceless aspirated and unaspirated stop consonants.

If /st/ belongs to 1 morpheme the t will not be aspirated.

Ex: distaste /t/ will be be aspirated (dis & taste)

but distend /t/ won't be aspirated.

Anton Sherwood · Answer

Restaurant has three morphemes: it is the participle (–ant) of a French verb, whose Latin ancestor added a prefix re– to the root staur; the Proto-Indo-European ancestor of this root is reconstructed as steh₂u–ro– (a suffixed variant of steh₂), so maybe I should say four morphemes, though I have no idea what the –ro– contributes to the meaning.
None of this helps you know whether the syllable break in English pronunciation is re-stau or res-tau.

"restaurant" has 1 or 2 morphemes?

One Answer

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question