Morpheme

Lore & Background

Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound. Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g., town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g., town hall, doghouse). Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only when accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, specifically prefixes and suffixes. Examples of suffixes are -tion, -sion, -tive, -ation, -ible, and -ing. Bound morphemes that are not affixed are called cranberry morphemes.

Reader's Guide

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional. Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change the semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective to a noun. Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb or the number, grammatical gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun without affecting the word's meaning or class. English has eight inflections. Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in form but are semantically similar. A zero-morpheme carries semantic meaning but is not realized in speech. Content morphemes express concrete meaning, while function morphemes have a grammatical role. In generative grammar, the definition of a morpheme depends on whether syntactic trees have morphemes as leaves or features as leaves.

Did You Know?

• The plural morpheme for regular nouns (-s) has three allomorphs: /s/, /ɪz/ or /əz/, and /z/.
• The word 'unbreakable' is composed of three morphemes: un-, break, and -able.
• A zero-morpheme is used to analyze the plural of 'sheep' as sheep + -∅.
• The suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g., sell → seller) or inflectional (e.g., small → smaller).