LEC:3

Morphology
 Morphology
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Morphology is the branch of linguistics (and one of
the major components of grammar) that studies the
structure of words.
Example:
Careful Care - ful
Cats Cat-s
 Morpheme
• The smallest unit which has. meaning or grammatical function
that words can be broken down into is known as morpheme.
For example, if we break the word “Cats”, we get two
morphemes, “Cat” and “s”.
• “Cat” is the smallest unit with a meaning and can be regarded
as both a morpheme and a word.
• “s” is also a morpheme because it has grammatical function.
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Types of Morpheme
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Morpheme can be divided into 2 classes. They are-
1. Free Morpheme 2. Bound Morpheme
1. Free Morpheme:
A free morpheme is a morpheme that can stand by itself as a
single word. Ex: color, word, and, in etc.
Free morphemes can be –
a. Lexical morpheme
b. Grammatical(functional) morpheme
 Types of Morpheme
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a. Lexical. morpheme:
• Lexical morphemes carry the content or meaning of the messages that one is
conveying.
• Lexical Morphemes are consisted of nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. e.g. :
Come, Time, Good etc.
b. Grammatical(functional) morpheme:
• Functional morphemes do not carry the content of a message, rather help the
sentence to function grammatically.
• Functional Morphemes are consisted of conjunctions, prepositions, articles,
quantifiers, demonstratives, auxiliary verbs, pronouns and interjection .
• e.g. : to, at, this, and, few etc.
 Types of Morpheme
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2. Bound morpheme: A bound morpheme cannot exist as
word itself. It is attached to some other morpheme.
e.g. dis-, un-, -ness -s etc.

Disappear, Unhappy, Cuteness Cats etc.

Bound morphemes can be divided into 2 types. They are-
a. Derivational Morpheme
b. Inflectional Morpheme
 Derivational Morphemes
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.

• Derivational morphemes can transform words into different grammatical

categories from the root word (stem) .
• These morphemes transform words into different parts of speech.

Examples : -ful, -ness,, -ly, -y,

Friend= noun
Friendly= adjective (Suffixation)
Befriend = Verb (Prefixation)
 Inflectional Morpheme
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Inflectional morphemes don’t alter the word class of a

word. Instead, they only refine and give extra grammatical
information about the word’s already existing meaning.
For example:
Bus → Buses
Tall → Taller
 Types of Morpheme
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There are. 8 inflectional morphemes in English (all are suffixes).
-s 3rd person sing. present e.g. He walks.
-ed past tense e.g. He walked.
-ing progressive e.g. He is walking .
-en past participle e.g. She had eaten.
-s plural e.g. The cars.
-’s possessive e.g. The Chairman’s car.
-er comparative e.g. She was smarter.
-est superlative e.g. He was the coolest.
Identify different morphemes
1. The students executed the event successfully.
2. Motherhood is a blessing.