MORPHEME: FREE AND BOUND

Words are potentially complex units, composed of even more basic units, called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has grammatical function or meaning (NB not the smallest unit of meaning); we will designate them in braces—{ }. For example, sawed, sawn, sawing, and saws can all be analyzed into the morphemes {saw}+{-ed},{-n},{-ing},and{-s}, respectively. None of these last four can be further divided into meaningful units and each occurs in many other words, such as looked, mown, coughing, bakes.

There are two kinds of morphemes, namely:

1.           Free Morphemes: can occur as separate words (dog; walk; berry; yes).

{Saw} can occur on its own as a word; it does not have to be attached to another morpheme. It is a free morpheme. However, none of the other morphemes listed just above is free. Each must be affixed (attached) to some other unit; each can only occur as a part of a word. Morphemes that must be attached as word parts are said to be bound.

Free morpheme divided into two, they are:

1. Content (Lexical) Morphemes: express general referential or informational content, a meaning that is essentially independent of the grammatical system of a      particular language.

Content morphemes are also often called open-classmorphemes, because they belong to categories that are open to the addition of arbitrary new items. People are always making up or borrowing new morphemes in these categories: smurf, nuke, byte, grok, chalupa, baathist.

2. Functional (Grammatical) Morphemes: other morphemes are heavily tied to a grammatical function, expressing syntactic relationships between units in a sentence, or obligatorily marked categories such as number or tense.

By contrast, the following are typically functional (closed-class) morphemes:

v    prepositions: to, by, from, with

v    articles: the, a

v    pronouns: she, his, my

v    conjunctions: and, but, although

note:

v    Such morphemes either serve to tie elements together grammatically (hit by a truck, Pat and Chris), or

v    to express morphological features such as definiteness that may be required in a particular language (She found a/the table vs. *She found table.

v    Function morphemes are also called “closed-class” categories– essentially closed to invention or borrowing.

2.          Bound Morphemes: cannot occur on their own as full words (-s in dogs; de- in detoxify; -ness in happiness; cran- in cranberry)

Besides being bound or free, morphemes can also be classified as root, derivational, or inflectional. A root morpheme is the basic form to which other morphemes are attached. It provides the basic meaning of the word. The morpheme {saw} is the root of sawers. Derivational morphemes are added to forms to create separate words: {-er} is a derivational suffix whose addition turns a verb into a noun, usually meaning the person or thing that performs the action denoted by the verb. For example, {paint}+{-er} creates painter, one of whose meanings is “someone who paints.”

Inflectional morphemes do not create separate words. They merely modify the word in which they occur in order to indicate grammatical properties such as plurality, as the {-s} of magazines does, or past tense, as the {ed} of babecued does. English has eight inflectional morphemes, which we will describe below.

We can regard the root of a word as the morpheme left over when all the derivational and inflectional morphemes have been removed. For example, in immovability, {im-}, {-abil}, and {-ity} are all derivational morphemes, and when we remove them we are left with {move}, which cannot be further divided into meaningful pieces, and so must be the word’s root. We must distinguish between a word’s root and the forms to which affixes are attached. In moveable, {-able} is attached to {move}, which we’ve determined is the word’s root. However, {im-} is attached to moveable, not to {move} (there is no word immove), but moveable is not a root. Expressions to which affixes are attached are called bases. While roots may be bases, bases are not always roots.

ALLOMORPH

Allomorph is variant form of a morpheme but it doesn’t change the meaning. Allomorph has different in pronunciation and spelling according to their condition. It means that allomorph will have different sound, pronunciation or spelling in different condition. The condition depends on the element that it attaches to. Example:

A teacher : A (Allomorph), teacher (Root/Stem), Countable noun (Meaning)

An Egg : An (Allomorph), egg (Root/Stem), Countable noun (Meaning)
Illogical : Il (Allomorph), logical (Root/Stem), negative (Meaning)
Impossible : Im (Allomorph), possible (Root/Stem), negative (Meaning)