Worksheet (2) / unit one

Derivational morphemes
Princess Sumaya University for Technology
14th of Oct, 2020
Instructor: Iman Bani Salameh

:Outcomes

1- Identifying derivational morphemes

2- Recognizing the functions of derivational morphemes

:A morpheme:  Is the smallest meaningful unit in a language. Morphemes could be

One letter (s) ----- Dog /dogs (bound) (inflectional) (changes the form) -1

a group of letters ---------- 1-Beauty / beautiful (bound/ derivational/ suffix) (changes -2

the part of speech)

Build / rebuild (bound /derivational/ prefix) (changes -2

the semantic meaning)

Note ((re) is not always a prefix it could be a part of the word e.g (reality, regualar) **

a word----- (beauty) -3

A morpheme is not necessarily the same as a word, morpheme  sometimes does *

not stand alone, but a word does (root)

Every word is a morpheme but not every morpheme is a word *

Types of Morphemes

1- Free morphemes can function independently as words (root) (e.g. town, dog) 

2- 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 accompanied by other morphemes to form a

word.

**Most bound morphemes in English are affixes ( prefixes and suffixes).

 **Examples of suffixes are -tion, -sion, -tive, -ation, -ible, and -ing.

**Examples of prefixes are un-, pre-

Types of bound morphemes

1-Inflectional morphemes: Morpheme that change the form of a word but not the
meaning nor the class (part of speech).

***Example they modify the tense,  number of a verb,

Examples : Adding -s to the root dog to form dogs, or adding -ed 

Adding -ed to the root wait to form waited. An inflectional ***.

2-Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change the semantic meaning

or the part of speech of the affected word.

e.g 1 In the word (happiness), the addition of the bound morpheme –ness  to the
root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness).

e.g 2 In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme since it inverts the

meaning of the root morpheme (word) kind. Generally, morphemes that affix (i.e.,
affixes) to a root morpheme (word) are bound morphemes.

Go to pages 4 and 8 in your book and do the exercises