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According to Wikipedia,

> In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language.
> In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language.

By that definition, do you think a compound word like 「外食」 should be
considered as a morpheme, or should it be further divided into 「外」 and 「食」
because each of them carry their own meaning?
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2016-03-27T22:08:58.007
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2016-03-31T16:42:40.097
2016-03-28T04:30:18.100
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linguistics morphology
Can compound words like 「外食」be considered as a morpheme?
Not sure I should answer this, but it is related to Japanese after all, so
I'll go ahead.

So, by definition - no. 外食 is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem.
That alone is enough to say that it cannot be a morpheme. To elaborate a bit
more, both 外 and 食 are actually unbound morphemes (they appear not only as
part of larger words), meaning that it's impossible for a combination of the
two to be a single morpheme. One might even go as far as say that there are no
bound morphemes in Japanese that have a Kanji writing, though I'm not an
expert in Japanese linguistics, so take that statement with a grain of salt.
An example of a bound morpheme in Japanese, by the way, would be the な
modifier (the one you see in 形容動詞).
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2016-03-31T16:29:46.150
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answer