by Shanan King

Created on: January 22, 2012   Last Updated: January 23, 2012

Morphemes, in the scientific study of language called linguistics, are the smallest semantic units in language. This means the smallest meaningful unit in language. Morphemes fall under the category of grammar in linguistics and its study is morphology.

Morphemes may or may not stand-alone whereas words are freestanding units of meaning. Every word is made of one or more morphemes. They may be either free or bound but not both, with bound morphemes further categorized as derivational or inflectional. There are also unique morphemes, so named because of their limited appearance, in only one particular word.

Free Morphemes

Often referred to as roots, they are morphemes that are able to stand-alone as words (dog, mouse).

Bound Morphemes

Also referred to as suffixes, prefixes, affixes, and infixes, bound morphemes can only appear as parts of words, always in conjunction with a free morpheme and sometimes with other bound morphemes.

Derivational morphemes are bound morphemes that change the meaning of the root or part of speech, create a new word, or that invert the word’s meaning. -Un is a negative prefix (changing the root happy to unhappy), -pre is a prefix with the meaning of before (preview, prerequisite), -re is a prefix meaning again (review, redo, reorganize). Suffixes appear at the end of a root such as –ly and –less. They are not productive, such as dislike and disappear and in the English language can be either suffixes or prefixes. They occur at the beginning of an inflectional bound morpheme.

Inflectional morphemes consist of only eight bound morphemes: -s, -ed,-ing, - en, -s, -'s, -er, -est. They do not change the meaning of the root; instead, they make grammatical changes essential for agreement with other words. Adding -s to denote plural forms of a word and adding -ing and -ed to verbs to denote the proper tense are some examples of inflectional bound morphemes. They are productive and in the English language they can only appear as suffixes, occurring after derivational bound morphemes.

Unique Morphemes

Morphemes are words that appear only as bound roots and have no constant meaning. Cran in cranberry is one such example, which has given unique morphemes the name of Cranberry morphemes.  Another example is ceive, as in receive and perceive.

Content or Function

All morphemes either are content morphemes or are function morphemes. The former carry semantic content, differentiated from the latter by not performing a grammatical function.

To form words, add an affix (suffix or prefix), called affixing to the root, combine two or more free morphemes to form a compound word, or blend to create a new word by combining the beginning of one morpheme with the ending of another.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme

http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu

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