Morphemes

SLIDE 1 What are Morphemes?

A "morpheme" is a short segment of language that meets three basic criteria:

1. It is a word or a part of a word that has meaning.

2. It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful segments without changing its meaning or leaving a
meaningless remainder.

3. It has relatively the same stable meaning in different verbal environments.

SLIDE 1 Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme cat); other
morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the -s in
cats indicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind
of plurality.

SLIDE 1 Classification
There are free and bound morphemes

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.

SLIDE 1 Classification of bound morphemes

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional morphemes. The main
difference between them is their function in relation to words.

 Derivational bound morphemes

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 (happy) to a noun (happiness). 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.

 Inflectional bound morphemes

Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb or the number,
gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of
speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form
dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. An inflectional morpheme changes the form of a word.
English has eight inflections.

SLIDE 1 There are a large number of derivational affixes in English. In contrast, there are only eight
"inflectional affixes" in English, and these are all suffixes. English has the following inflectional suffixes,
which serve a variety of grammatical functions when added to specific types of words. These
grammatical functions are shown to the right of each suffix.

-s noun plural

-'s noun possessive

-s verb present tense third person singular

-ing verb present participle/gerund

-ed verb simple past tense

-en verb past perfect participle

-er adjective comparative

-est adjective superlative

 SLIDE 1 Allomorphs

Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in form but are semantically similar. For example, the
English plural marker has three allomorphs: /-z/ (bugs), /-s/ (bats), or /-ɪz, -əz/ (buses). An allomorph is a
concrete realization of a morpheme, which is an abstract unit. That is parallel to the relation of an
allophone and a phoneme.

 SLIDE 1 Zero-morpheme

A zero-morpheme is a type of morpheme that carries semantic meaning but is not represented by
auditory phoneme. A word with a zero-morpheme is analyzed as having the morpheme for grammatical
purposes, but the morpheme is not realized in speech. They are often represented by /∅/ within glosses.
[8]

Generally, such morphemes have no visible changes. For instance, sheep is both the singular and the
plural forms; rather than taking the usual plural suffix -s to form hypothetical *sheeps, the plural is
analyzed as being composed of sheep + -∅, the null plural suffix. The intended meaning is thus derived
from the co-occurrence determiner

SLIDE 1 There are two types of morphemes: free (free morphemes) and bound (bound morphemes).
Thus, free morphemes can be used independently in English speech, while bound morphemes are used
only in connection with other morphemes.
An example of a free morpheme is the word "sad", and a bound one is "-ly". As you may have guessed,
"ly" cannot be used as an independent word, although it carries a certain meaning. To become an
independent unit, it must be combined with other morphemes.

For example:

Free morpheme: sad - sadness

Related morpheme: -ly

Word: sadly - sad

Free morpheme: tall - tall

Related morpheme: -er

Word: taller - higher

Free morpheme: cat - cat / cat

Associated morpheme: -s

Word: cats

SLIDE 1 Other related morphemes are called affixes. These include: prefixes (prefixes), suffixes
(suffixes), infixes (infixes) and circumfixes (circumfixes). Prefixes are placed before another morpheme,
suffixes are added to its end, infixes are integrated into the middle of a word; and circumfixes are used
both at the beginning and at the end of a morpheme.

Infixes in English are a rather delicate issue. They are more common in spoken language or slang.
However, some experts attribute the -s in the word fathers-in-law to their number.