What is the smallest unit of language that can convey meaning, such as cook/ed?

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

Answer: (A)

Meaning comes from pieces smaller than a word itself. These pieces are morphemes—the smallest units that carry semantic or grammatical meaning. In cook/ed, you can think of two morphemes: the root "cook" which carries the core idea of cooking, and the suffix "-ed" which adds the grammatical meaning of past tense. Put together, they form a word that conveys that something was cooked in the past. Some morphemes can stand alone as words (free morphemes), while others must attach to other morphemes to add meaning (bound morphemes), like "-ed."

Phonemes are units of sound, not meaning. Lexemes are the dictionary-form words you look up, like the word "cook" itself, but they aren’t the smallest pieces that can alter meaning. Syntax deals with how words are arranged, not with the smallest meaningful pieces themselves.