The classification of morphemes

Morphology is the study of words, word formation, and the relationship between words. In Morphology, we look at morphemes — the smallest lexical items of meaning. Studying morphemes helps us to understand the meaning, structure, and etymology (history) of words.

Linguistics is the study of language, and there is a lot to unpack about language, so why not start small? Words are the smallest unit of meaning in a language, right? Guess again! Small segments of sound that carry meaning—many even smaller than words—are called morphemes. There are many types of morphemes that can come together to make a single word.

Morphology is the study of these sub-word sounds and how they function to create meaning in language.

It’s easy to forget that there are linguistic units smaller than words that hold meaning. Most native English speakers likely don’t think about the meaning of sounds like -ed, -ing, and -acious, but they use them—and other derivational morphemes—hundreds of times a day (there have been several in this paragraph already).

Morphemes can be either inflectional or derivational, meaning they can form new words or add inflection to existing words. The simple definition is that derivational morphemes are those that derive new words. It would be difficult to create an exhaustive list of the examples and types of derivational morphemes, as they are one of the most productive way to create new words in the English language.

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Free Morphemes and Bound Morphemes

Morphemes that can stand alone to function as words are called free morphemes. They comprise simple words (i.e. words made up of one free morpheme) and compound words (i.e. words made up of two free morphemes).

Simple words: the, run, on, well

Compound words: keyboard, greenhouse, bloodshed, smartphone

Morphemes that can only be attached to another part of a word (cannot stand alone) are called bound morphemes.

pre-, dis-, in-, un-, -ful, -able, -ment, -ly, -ise

Complex words are words that are made up of both free morpheme(s) and bound morpheme(s), or two or more bound morphemes.

Roll your mouse over the words below to see how many morphemes are there and whether they are or .

Root and Affixes

Affixation is the most common word formation process in English. Words are formed by adding affixes to roots.

Roots can be free or bound morphemes. They cannot be further analyzed into smaller parts. They form the base forms of the words.

Affixes are bound morphemes. They can be classified into prefixes and suffixes in English.

Can you tell the different functions of the suffixes and the suffixes?

The free morphemes we looked at earlier (such as tree, book, and tall) fall into two categories:

Reminder: Most words are free morphemes because they have meaning on their own, such as house, book, bed, light, world, people etc.

Lexical morphemes are words that give us the main meaning of a sentence, text or conversation. These words can be nouns, adjectives and verbs. Examples of lexical morphemes include:

Because we can add new lexical morphemes to a language (new words get added to the dictionary each year!), they are considered an ‘open’ class of words.

Functional (or grammatical) morphemes are mostly words that have a functional purpose, such as linking or referencing lexical words. Functional morphemes include prepositions, conjunctions, articles and pronouns. Examples of functional morphemes include:

We can rarely add new functional morphemes to the language, so we call this a ‘closed’ class of words.

Allomorphs are a variant of morphemes. An allomorph is a unit of meaning that can change its sound and spelling but doesn’t change its meaning and function.

In English, the indefinite article morpheme has two allomorphs. forms are ‘a’ and ‘an’. If the indefinite article precedes a word beginning with a constant sound it is ‘a’, and if it precedes a word beginning with a vowel sound, it is ‘an’.

Past Tense allomorphs

In English, regular verbs use the past tense morpheme -ed; this shows us that the verb happened in the past. The pronunciation of this morpheme changes its sound according to the last consonant of the verb but always keeps its past tense function. This is an example of an allomorph.

Consider regular verbs ending in t or d, like ‘rent’ or ‘add’.

Now look at their past forms: ‘rented’ and ‘added’. Try pronouncing them. Notice how the -ed at the end changes to an /id/ sound (e.g. rent /ɪd/, add /ɪd/).

Now consider the past simple forms of want, rest, print, and plant. When we pronounce them, we get: wanted (want /ɪd/), rested (rest /ɪd/), printed (print /ɪd/), planted (plant /ɪd/).

When a noun ends in a voiceless consonant (i.e. ch, f, k, p, s, sh, t, th), the plural allomorph is /s/.

Book becomes books (pronounced book/s/)

When a noun ends in a voiced phoneme (i.e. b, l, r, j, d, v, m, n, g, w, z, a, e, i, o, u) the plural form remains ‘s’ or ‘es’ but the allomorph sound changes to /z/.

Key becomes keys (pronounced key/z/)

bees (pronounced bee/z/)

When a noun ends in a sibilant (i.e. s, ss, z), the sound of the allomorph sound becomes /iz/.

Bus becomes buses (bus/iz/)

house becomes houses (hous/iz/)

A sibilant is a phonetic sound that makes a hissing sound, e.g. ‘s’ or ‘z’.

Zero (bound) morphemes

The zero bound morpheme has no phonetic form and is also referred to as an invisible affix, null morpheme, or ghost morpheme.

A zero morpheme is when a word changes its meaning but does not change its form.

In English, certain nouns and verbs do not change their appearance even when they change number or tense.

Sheep, deer, and fish, keep the same form whether they are used as singular or plural.

Some verbs like hit, cut, and cost remains the same in their present and past forms.

I have seen conflicting charts and models of morphemes. Here’s how I understand it.

Free morphemes do not require other morphemes to make sense. That means that all free morphemes are words. Content words have meaning, but no function beyond that meaning: examples include dog, house and car.

The category of functional words is comprised of all conjunctions, prepositions, determiners, auxiliary verbs, modals, qualifiers, question words and pronouns, who serve a function instead of possessing a concrete meaning. Examples include the, over and her. Content words is an open class of words, meaning it receives additions more commonly. Functional words is a closed class of words, meaning it rarely receives additions.

Bound morphemes require other morphemes to make sense. Therefore, a bound morpheme is either a root or an affix. Roots can be both bound morphemes and free morphemes. Roots are just the remnants after all affixes have been removed. If the remnant root doesn’t make sense on its own, then it is a bound root. If it does make sense, it is a word, and a free morpheme. Examples of bound roots are -ceive and sci-.

Affixes are additions to a word, either at the front (prefix), end (suffix), in the middle (infix), around (circumfix), at multiple places (transfix). These additions may take the form of one or multiple phoneme changes (simulfix), the full or partial, identical or similar, duplication of a root/stem/word (duplifix) or the removal of a part of the word (disfix).

The derivational affixes modify the word’s meaning. Examples include pre-, post-, dys- and mal-.

The inflectional affixes modify the grammatical properties of the word, such as a verb’s tense, aspect, person, mood or number, or a noun/adjective/pronoun’s number, gender or case. According to Wikipedia, affixes that change the class of a word (comprised of nominal, verbal, adjectival and adverbial affixes) are a part of the derivational affixes. This doesn’t quite make sense to me, as I thought a word’s class was a grammatical property.

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Null morphemes are morphemes without phonemic content. In English, there is no affix for words that are singular. No visible or audible affix, that is. There has been conceptualized an affix, or a null morpheme. For example, dogs can be divided up into dog + s, the s being the inflectional morpheme that changes the root’s number. However, dog could be divided into dog + /Ø/, the /Ø/ being an unpronounced and unwritten morpheme that may only exist in the average person’s subconscious conceptualization of words and the linguistically educated person’s subconscious and conscious conceptualization of words.

Now, another way of dividing up morphemes is into lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes, also called content morphemes and functional morphemes, which is confusing due to the categories of content words and functional words. This confusion is the biggest component of uncertainty in my understanding of morpheme typology. This is how this other categorization looks.

The category of empty morphemes doesn’t really have a place on this diagram because they neither have meaning nor a grammatical purpose. If they should exist on the first diagram is debatable in the first place.

So, the questions I am left with are these: Are the two featured categorizations correct? Why aren’t class-changing affixes regarded as inflectional affixes? What is really the fundamental difference between a bound root and an affix? They are both units of meaning that require other morphemes to make sense; why is one considered a root and the other not? Why are «empty morphemes» a thing when they don’t comply with the definition of morphemes?

Chapter 5: Morphology

Affixes vs roots

Morphemes can be of different types, and can come in different shapes. Some morphemes are affixes: they can’t stand on their own, and have to attach to something. The morphemes -s (in cats) and inter– and -al (in international) are all affixes.

The thing an affix attaches to is called a base. Just like whole words, some bases are morphologically simple, while others are morphologically complex.

For example, consider the word librarian. This word is formed by attaching the affix -ian to the base library.

Librarian can then itself be the base for another affix: for example, the word librarianship, the state or role of being a librarian, is formed by attaching the affix -ship to the base librarian.

There is a special name for simple bases: root. A root is the smallest possible base, which cannot be divided, what we might think of as the core of a word. Roots in English we’ve seen so far in this chapter include cat, library, and nation.

If you look at the history of the words library and nation, they both trace back to Latin (by way of French), and in Latin the relevant words were morphologically complex: library traces back to the Latin root libr- (meaning “book”), and nation traces back to the Latin root nat- (meaning “be born”). When a child first encounters a word like library or nation, however, the word doesn’t come annotated with this historical information! In the minds of most contemporary English speakers, it is likely that library and nation are treated as simple roots; in Chapter 13, you’ll learn about how this kind of hypothesis could be tested experimentally.

Turning back to affixes, an affix is any morpheme that needs to attach to a base. We use the term “affix” when we want to refer to all of these together, but we often specify what type of affix we’re talking about.

Prefixes and suffixes are very common, not only in English but also in other languages. Circumfixes, infixes, and simultaneous affixes are less common, and so we’ll look at examples of each in order.

Circumfix

What you can see here is that the singular possessor in “my daughters” is marked only by a prefix, but the plural possessor in “our daughters” is marked by the combination of the prefix ni- and the suffix -ena·n—or, in other words, by a circumfix.

These examples have morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, which means that the morphological analysis has been done for you; in Section 5.11 we’ll discuss how we figure out the boundaries between morphemes in a language we aren’t already familiar with.

Glossed examples include at least three lines: the first line gives the example in the original language, usually in either a phonetic transcription or the language’s own orthography. The second line gives the meaning or function of each word or each morpheme (if the words are divided into morphemes). The third line gives a translation of the whole example into the language the author is writing in, which in this textbook is English.

Morpheme-by-morpheme glosses use standard abbreviations:

Infix

Infixes are affixes that appear in the middle of another morpheme. For example, in Tagalog (a language with about 24 million speakers, most of them in the Philippines) the infix -um- appears immediately after the first consonant of the base to which it attaches. This infix expresses perfective aspect for verbs. Perfective aspect indicates completed action, usually translated with the English simple past:

For an affix to be an infix, it must appear inside another another morpheme, not just in the middle of a word. If you look at the word unluckiness (un-luck-y-ness), for example, -y is a suffix that just happens to appear in the middle of the word because another suffix (-ness) attaches after it. But -y still isn’t an infix, because it attaches after its base (luck), not inside its base.

Simultaneous affix

Simultaneous affixes are common in signed languages and in languages with tone. When signing, it’s possible to do things with multiple articulators (a second hand, or your face), or to add motion on top of a sign, in a way that is not possible with oral articulations in spoken languages.

For example, in ASL there is a morpheme that attaches to verbs to express continuative aspect (the meaning that something happens continuously for a while, or for a long time). This morpheme involves adding a particular circular motion to the base sign for the verb; this circular motion doesn’t happen before or after the verb, but simultaneously with it. You can see the application of this affix in the first and last videos for the verb STUDY in this linked article from the online Handspeak ASL dictionary (Lapiak 1995–2022) (the second video in that post shows the application of a different simultaneous affix, one for iterative aspect).

There is morphology in some spoken languages that has a similar profile. For example, languages with tone sometimes have tonal morphemes, where a change in tone expresses grammatical information, while the consonants and vowels of the base stay the same.

English isn’t a tonal language, but we have some pairs of words that clearly involve the same root, but where the stress has shifted. These are noun-verb pairs where the noun has stress on the first syllable, but the verb has stress on the second syllable.

Not all English speakers have stress shift in the same pairs of words. For example, while I pronounce address with stress on the first syllable when it’s a noun, many people pronounce it with stress on the second syllable (addréss) for both the noun and the verb.

Free and bound morphemes

Another way to divide morphemes is by whether they are free or bound. A free morpheme is one that can occur as a word on its own. For example, cat is a free morpheme. A bound morpheme, by contrast, can only occur in words if it’s accompanied by one or more other morphemes.

Because affixes by definition need to attach to a base, only roots can be free. In English most roots are free, but we do have a few roots that can’t occur on their own. For example, the root -whelmed, which occurs in overwhelmed and underwhelmed, can’t occur on its own as *whelmed.

By contrast, in many other languages all (or most) roots are bound, because they always have to occur with at least some morphology. This is the case for verbs in French and the other Romance languages, for example; it was also the case for Latin, which is why the roots nat- and libr- were shown with hyphens above.

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We show that morphemes are bound by putting hyphens either before or after them, on the side that they attach to other morphemes. This applies to bound roots as well as to affixes.

Check your understanding

Lapiak, Jolanta. 1995–2022. Handspeak. https://www.handspeak.com/

Oxford, William R. 2020. Algonquian. In Routledge handbook of North American languages, ed. Daniel Siddiqi , Michael Barrie, Carrie Gillon, and Éric Mathieu. Routledge.

List of Class-Changing Derivational Morphemes

There are more instances of derivational morphemes changing the word class of the word to which they’re added. Below is a list of class-changing derivational morphemes. In these examples, the noun changes to a verb with the addition of the derivational morphemes.

Below are examples of verbs changing to adjectives with derivational morphemes:

Derivational morphemes can also change verbs to nouns (track/tracker), nouns to adjectives (boy/boyish), and so on.

Affixes are bound morphemes that occur before or after a base word. They are made up of suffixes and prefixes.

Suffixes are attached to the end of the base or root word. Some of the most common suffixes include -er, -or, -ly, -ism, and -less.

Prefixes come before the base word. Typical prefixes include ante-, pre-, un-, and dis-.

Derivational affixes are used to change the meaning of a word by building on its base. For instance, by adding the prefix ‘un-‘ to the word ‘kind’, we got a new word with a whole new meaning. In fact, ‘unkind’ has the exact opposite meaning of ‘kind’!

Another example is adding the suffix ‘-or’ to the word ‘act’ to create ‘actor’. The word ‘act’ is a verb, whereas ‘actor’ is a noun.

Inflectional affixes only modify the meaning of words instead of changing them. This means they modify the words by making them plural, comparative or superlative, or by changing the verb tense.

books — books

short — shor

quick — quickest

walk — walked

climb — climbing

There are many derivational affixes in English, but only eight inflectional affixes and these are all suffixes.

All prefixes in English are derivational. However, suffixes may be either derivational or inflectional.

Morphology Examples

Sometimes it’s easier to see a visual representation of something than to explain it. Morphological trees do exactly that.

Unreachable – the inability to be reached or contacted

Un (inflectional morpheme) reach (lexical morpheme) able (free morpheme)

This example shows how the word unreachable can be broken into individual morphemes.

The morpheme able is an affix that changes the word reach (a verb) to reachable (an adjective.) This makes it a derivational morpheme.

After you add the affix un- you get the word unreachable which is the same grammatical category (adjective) as reachable, and so this is an inflectional morpheme.

Motivation – the reason or reasons why someone does something

Motiv (lexical morpheme) ate (derivational morpheme) ion (derivational morpheme)

The root word is motive (a noun) which, with the addition of the affix -ate becomes motivate (a verb). The addition of the bound morpheme -ion changes the verb motivate to the noun motivation.

Morphemes — Key takeaways

There are two types of morphemes:

Free morphemes can stand alone and don’t need to be attached to any other morphemes to get their meaning. Most words are free morphemes, such as the above-mentioned words house, book, bed, light, world, people, and so on.

, however, cannot stand alone. The most common example of bound morphemes are suffixes, such as -s, -er, -ing, and -est.

Let’s look at some examples of free and bound morphemes:

‘Tall’ and ‘Tree’ are free morphemes.

We understand what ‘tall’ and ‘tree’ mean; they don’t require extra add-ons. We can use them to create a simple sentence like ‘That tree is tall.’

On the other hand, ‘-er’ and ‘-s’ are bound morphemes. You won’t see them on their own because they are suffixes that add meaning to the words they are attached to.

Fig. 1 — These are the differences between free vs bound morphemes

So if we add ‘-er’ to ‘tall’ we get the comparative form ‘taller’, while ‘tree’ plus ‘-s’ becomes plural: ‘trees’.

Derivational Morphemes — Key takeaways

The word morphemes from the Greek morphḗ, meaning ‘shape, form’. Morphemes are the smallest lexical items of meaning or grammatical function that a word can be broken down to. Morphemes are usually, but not always, words.

These words cannot be made shorter than they already are or they would stop being words or lose their meaning.

‘house’ cannot be split into ho- and -us’ as they are both meaningless.

not all morphemes are words.

For example, ‘s’ is not a word, but it ‘s’ shows plurality and means ‘more than one’.

The word ‘books’ is made up of two morphemes:

Morphemes play a fundamental role in the structure and meaning of language, and understanding them can help us to better understand the words we use and the rules that govern their use.

How to identify a morpheme

Morphology and syntax are close to one another in terms of the linguistic domain. While morphology studies the smallest units of meaning in language, syntax deals with how words are linked together to create meaning.

The difference between syntax and morphology is essentially the difference between studying how words are formed (morphology) and how sentences are formed (syntax).

Structure

Morphemes are made up of two separate classes.

is the main root that gives the word its meaning.

On the other hand, an is a morpheme we can add that or of the

‘Kind’ is the free base morpheme in the word ‘kindly’. (kind + -ly)

‘-less’ is a bound morpheme in the word ‘careless’. (Care + -less)

Morphology and Semantics

Semantics is one level removed from morphology in the grand scheme of linguistic study. Semantics is the branch of linguistics responsible for understanding meaning in general. To understand the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text, you might rely on semantics.

Morphology also deals with meaning to a degree, but only in as much as the smaller sub-word units of language can carry meaning. To examine the meaning of anything larger than a morpheme would fall under the domain of semantics.

Derivational Morpheme Examples

Here are some examples of derivational morphemes:

As we’ve seen, there are many examples of derivational morphemes in the English language. Interestingly, there is no theoretical limit to how many derivational morphemes you can add to a word.

For example, think of the word «proportion». It’s a noun meaning the size or shape of something relative to its whole. Add the suffix -ate, and the word is now «proportionate,» referring to something that is equal in size or shape relative to its whole. But if something is not proportionate, you could add the prefix dis- to get the word «disproportionate.» If you wanted to describe something that is disproportionate, you simply add the suffix -ly to get «disproportionately.»

Each time we added an affix, the word changed significantly; whether changing word class, as it does when you add -ly to get an adverb, or simply negating the base word with dis- to derive disproportionate.

Other morphologically complex words:

Morphology — Key takeaways

There are two types of bound morphemes: inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. The difference between derivational and inflectional morphemes is that inflectional morphemes signal a change in a base word’s grammatical form, e.g., its number, gender, person, or tense.

Notice + ed = noticed

Plain + er = plainer

Nice + est = nicest

Crease +s = creases

Broke + en = broken

Lack + ing = lacking

An inflectional morpheme was added to each word, but it did not alter the word’s class. In other words, the nouns remained nouns (crease/ creases), the adjectives remained adjectives (nice/ nicest), and the verbs remained verbs (noticed/ noticed). Instead, the inflectional morphemes simply changed the words’ form to reflect tense, aspect, number, superlative form and so on.

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Fig 2. «The red house is nice, but this house is the nicest in the neighborhood.» Nice and nicest are two different words with the same base.

By contrast, derivational morphemes influence the base word to such a degree that it becomes a new word entirely. That new word may, of course, be related to the original in meaning, but it is a new word nonetheless.

If both an inflectional and derivational affix are attached to a single word, the derivational affix will be closest to the base word. For example, the word resignations = Resign + ation (derivational) + s (inflectional).

Class-Maintaining Derivational Morphemes

As mentioned, derivational morphemes don’t always change the word class; those that don’t are called class-maintaining derivational morphemes. Here’s an example where the word class stays the same with the addition of a derivational morpheme:

friend (noun) + ship = friendship (noun)

Even though the words friend and friendship are both nouns, they are separate words with different meanings; they cannot be used interchangeably. Derivational morphemes always change either the semantic meaning of a word or the part of speech. In the case of class-maintaining derivational morphemes, only the meaning changes.

Here are some common class-maintaining derivational morphemes:

Morpheme Types

There are two major types of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes. The smallest example is made up of one of each of these types of morphemes.

Small – is a free morpheme

-est – is a bound morpheme

A free morpheme is a morpheme that occurs alone and carries meaning as a word. Free morphemes are also called unbound or freestanding morphemes. You might also call a free morpheme a root word, which is the irreducible core of a single word.

These examples are all free morphemes because they cannot be subdivided into smaller pieces that hold significance. Free morphemes can be any type of word—whether an adjective, a noun, or anything else—they simply have to stand alone as a unit of language that conveys meaning.

You might be tempted to say that free morphemes are simply all words and leave it at that. This is true, but free morphemes are actually categorized as either lexical or functional according to how they function.

Lexical Morphemes

Lexical morphemes carry the content or meaning of a message.

You might think of them as the substance of language. To identify a lexical morpheme, ask yourself, “If I deleted this morpheme from the sentence, would it lose its meaning?” If this answer is yes, then you almost certainly have a lexical morpheme.

Functional Morphemes

As opposed to lexical morphemes, functional morphemes do not carry the content of a message. These are the words in a sentence that are more functional, meaning that they coordinate the meaningful words.

Remember that functional morphemes are still free morphemes, which means they can stand alone as a word with meaning. You wouldn’t categorize a morpheme such as re- or -un as a grammatical morpheme because they aren’t words that stand alone with meaning.

Unlike lexical morphemes, bound morphemes are those that cannot stand alone with meaning. Bound morphemes must occur with other morphemes to create a complete word.

Many bound morphemes are affixes.

An affix is an additional segment added to a root word to change its meaning. An affix may be added to the beginning (prefix) or the end (suffix) of a word.

Not all bound morphemes are affixes, but they are certainly the most common form. Here are a few examples of affixes you might see:

Bound morphemes can do one of two things: they can change the grammatical category of the root word (derivational morpheme), or they can simply alter its form (inflectional morpheme).

When a morpheme changes the way you’d categorize the root word grammatically, it’s a derivational morpheme.

Poor (adjective) + ly (derivational morpheme) = poorly (adverb)

The root word poor is an adjective, but when you add the suffix -ly—which is a derivational morpheme—it changes to an adverb. Other examples of derivational morphemes include -ness, non-, and -ful.

Inflectional Morphemes

When a bound morpheme is attached to a word but does not change the root word’s grammatical category, it is an inflectional morpheme. These morphemes simply modify the root word in some way.

Fireplace + s = fireplaces

Adding the -s to the end of the word fireplace did not change the word in any significant way—it simply modified it to reflect multiple rather than one single fireplace.

Definition of Derivational Morpheme

Before we get to the definition of derivational morphemes, let’s establish the meaning of the word derivation.

In linguistics, the term derivation refers to the creation of a new word.

The new, derived word is related to the previous form, but it is a new word nonetheless. Many words are derived by adding a morpheme, aka a letter or a cluster of letters. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. The key to morphemes is that they must carry some sort of significance.

Morphemes are usually groups of letters, although they can be a single letter. For example, the letter ‘s’ denotes plurality when you add it to the end of a word that is a noun—that is its meaning in that context. (It should be noted that /s/ is not a derivational morpheme, but we’ll get to why later.) The letter ‘w,’ and just about any other letter of the alphabet, is just a letter and doesn’t carry any particular meaning.

So what’s a derivational morpheme?

A derivational morpheme is an affix that derives a new word or a new form of an existing word.

As a reminder, an affix is a letter or group of letters we attach to the beginning (prefix) or end (suffix) of a root word. Here are some of the more common affixes in the English language.

Derivational morphemes, whether prefixes or suffixes, usually change word class when added to a word (though not always).

Bounty (noun) + ful = bountiful (adjective)

In this example, we can see that the derivational morpheme -ful changes the noun, bounty, to the adjective, bountiful.

Derivational morphemes cannot be a word in their own right, though, because they are bound morphemes. Bound morphemes must be bound to another word or morpheme to create a word. Bound morphemes are those that can never stand alone as a word—as opposed to free morphemes, which can be independent words. A few examples of free morphemes are words such as eat, big, and ocean, while bound morphemes are affixes like -ment, im-, and -ify.

Fig 1. Bound morphemes are always tied to an existing word.

Morphology Definition

Consider the word smallest from the paragraph above. This word can be broken down into two segments that carry significance: small and -est. While -est isn’t a word in and of itself, it does carry significance that any English-speaking person should recognize; it essentially means “the most.”

A division of linguistics, morphology is the study of the smallest segments of language that carry meaning.

Language includes everything from grammar to sentence structure, and the segments of language that we use to express meaning are most often words. Morphology deals with words and their makeup. But what are words made of?

There is an even smaller unit of language than morphemes—phonemes. Phonemes are the distinct components of sound that come together to build a morpheme or word. The difference between morphemes and phonemes is that morphemes carry significance or meaning in and of themselves, whereas phonemes do not. For example, the words dog and dig are separated by a single phoneme—the middle vowel—but neither /ɪ/ (as in dig) nor /ɒ/ (as in dog) carries meaning by itself.

Morphemes are the smallest units of language that have meaning and can’t be further subdivided.

When we put together the morphemes small (which is a word by itself) and -est (which is not a word but does mean something when added to a word) we get a new word that means something different from the word small.

Small – something slight in size.

Smallest – the most slight in size.

But what if we wanted to make a different word? There are other morphemes we can add to the root word small to make different combinations and, therefore, different words.

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