A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that contains an element of a word that cannot be divided into smaller parts. There are two types of morphemes. These are free morphemes and bound morphemes.
What are Free Morphemes?
Free morphemes are considered to be base words in linguistics. Base words that can stand alone (such as “book”) are known as free bases. Most free morphemes can be modified by affixes to form complex words.
There are two kinds of free morphemes based on what they do in a sentence: content words and function words.
Content Words make up the main meaning of a sentence and their parts of speech include nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Function words consist of articles, demonstratives, auxiliaries, quantifiers, prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions.
Examples of Free Morphemes
- Nouns: State, Ocean, Baby, Book, Ship etc.
- Adjectives: Big, Short, Thin, Pretty, Funny etc.
- Verbs: Admit, Advise, Run, Eat, Write etc.
- Articles: a, an, the.
- Demonstratives: This, These, Those, That.
- Auxiliary Verbs: Might, Had, Did, Can, Could, Shall etc.
- Quantifiers: Much, Many, Less, Most, More etc.
- Prepositions: At, of, On, Up, To, In etc.
- Pronouns: Him, They, Them, She, He etc.
- Conjunctions: Though, Even, And, Then, If etc.
What are Bound Morphemes?
Bound morphemes have no linguistic meaning unless they are connected to a root or base word, or in some cases, another bound morpheme. Prefixes and suffixes are two types of bound morphemes. Depending on how they modify a root word, bound morphemes can be grouped into two categories: inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes.
Examples of Bound Morphemes
There are eight inflectional morphemes organized by which part of speech they modify.
- Modify a Noun: -s / -es, -‘s / -s’
- Modify an Adjective: -er, -est
- Modify a Verb: -ed, -ing, -en
Derivational Morphemes changes the semantic meaning of a word and have roots in Greek or Latin.
- Prefixes: pre-, un-, non-, anti-, dis-
- Suffixes: -ize, -ine, -ary, -ate, -ion
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