Morphemes: Grammatical Definition and Examples in English

The grammatical morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language that comprise of practical and useful words in a language such as prepositions, conjunctions determiners, and pronouns. For example; and, but, or, above, on, into, after, that, the, etc.

In other words, those words that functions and remain in specific to define the relationship between one word morpheme and another words like at, in, -ion, -ed, -s, are called grammatical morphemes.

The main difference between a morpheme and a word is that the morpheme sometimes does not stand alone, but the word, by definition, always stands alone.

Grammatical morphemes are those pieces of language sound that reflect language categories (Time, Number, Gender, Aspect), each with one or more functions (Past, Present, Future are Tense functions; Unity and Plurality are Number functions).

Those words work to clarify the relationship between one flexible morpheme and another – words such as at, in, on, ed, -s, – are called a language morpheme. Those morphemes cannot stand alone as the so-called free morphemes (e.g., boy, food, ku, ku).

Many English words are made up of one free form. For example, each word in the following sentence has a different morpheme: “I need to go now, but you can stay.” Put another way, no nine words in that sentence can be broken down into smaller and more meaningful parts.

Examples of Grammatical Morphemes

Now we can finally say that a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit of a language in which the most meaningful words are made. 

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