19 morfemy

19. Types of morphemes in English.

Morpheme – a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function

Morphemes can be divided into two general classes:

Free morphemes – morphemes which can stand by themselves as single words, e.g. open, tour, dog

Bound morphemes – morphemes which cannot stand alone, but which are typically attached to other morphemes to form a word, e.g. re-, -ist, - ed, -s

. Bound morphemes are usually prefixes or suffixes. Unproductive, non-affix morphemes that exist only in bound form are known as ‘cranberry’ morphemes, from the ‘cran’ in that very word.

Example: The word reopened consists of three morphemes: re- (bound morpheme meaning ‘again’), -open- (free morpheme) and -ed (bound morpheme indicating past tense

Free morphemes fall into two categories

: lexical morphemes – set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which carry the ‘content’ of a message we convey e.g. boy, man, yellow, look, sincere

and functional morphemes – functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns e.g. and, but, when, on, near, in, the, that

. Bound morphemes can also be divided into two categories

derivational morphemes – used to make new words; added to a stem to make a word of a different grammatical category

The addition of the derivational morpheme –ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness.

Derivational morphemes include suffixes (e.g. -ish, -ly) and prefixes (e.g. re-, pre-, ex-, dis-, co-, un-).

They carry semantic information; inflectional morphemes – used to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word

. Inflectional morphemes carry grammatical information. In English all inflectional morphemes are suffixes (e.g. -ing, -ed, -er).