In the English language, a morpheme is the smallest unit that is meaningful. For example, the ‘s’ in the end of the word ‘cats’, is a morpheme. The ‘s’ won’t have any meaning if it is separated from the actual word. That is the difference between a word and a morpheme. A word has its own meaning, but a morpheme cannot have a meaning if it is not associated with a word.
There are two main types of morphemes in English – Free and Bounded.
Free morphemes, that can occur by their self, and bound morphemes, that cannot occur by their self. Now, bound morphemes are broadly categorized into two types: inflectional morphemes, and derivational morphemes. So, let us take a look at both the types with their examples!
Examples of Inflectional Morphemes
Inflectional morphemes are suffixes that get added to a word, thus, adding a grammatical value to it. It can assign a tense, a number, a comparison, or a possession. Here are some examples of inflectional morphemes.
- Plural: Bikes, Cars, Trucks, Lions, Monkeys, Buses, Matches, Classes
- Possessive: Boy’s, Girl’s, Man’s, Mark’s, Robert’s, Samantha’s, Teacher’s, Officer’s
- Tense: cooked, played, marked, waited, watched, roasted, grilled; sang, drank, drove
- Comparison: Faster, Slower, Quicker, Taller, Higher, Shorter, Smaller, Weaker, Stronger, Sharper, Bigger
- Superlative: Fastest, Slowest, Quickest, Tallest, Highest, Shortest, Smallest, Biggest, Weakest, Strongest, Sharpest
Examples of Derivational Morphemes
Derivational morphemes are the morphemes that change the part of speech of the word. For example, wonder-wonderful. It changes a word into an adjective. The word after we add a derivational morpheme in it can be called as a derivate. Here are some examples of derivational morphemes.
- Ful: Beautiful, Wonderful, Cheerful, Truthful, Tasteful, Flavourful, Joyful
- Able: Walkable, Understandable, Loveable, Laughable, Eatable
- Ment: Government, Establishment, Agreement
- Ness: Kindness, Truthfulness, Carelessness, Sadness
- Ly: Happily, Kindly, Fortunately, Sadly, Lively
We hope this quick guide gave you a clear understanding of Inflectional and derivational Morphemes, and how they are used in English language.
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