Morphemes

• Free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand by itself as a single word.

• Ex: dog, book, run, happy, new and tour.

• Bound morpheme: a morpheme such as un- or -ed that cannot stand alone and must be attached to another form.

Ex:

• Prefixes: pre-, re-, non-, un-, be-, anti-, ex-, miss-, de-, dis-, a-, com- devirational m

• Suffixes: -s, -ed, -or, -er, -ist, -less, -ful, -ly, -y, -ing, -en, -ance - devirational m

• Lexical morpheme ("open" class of words) : a free morpheme that is a content word such as a noun or verb -> content word

• Ex: nouns (girl, house), verbs (break, sit), adjectives (long, sad) and adverbs (never, quickly)

• Functional morpheme ("closed" class of words): a free morpheme that is used as a function word, such as a conjunction or a preposition. -> function word

• Ex: articles (a, the), conjunctions (and, because), prepositions (on, near) and pronouns (it, me), demonstrations (this, that, these, those).

A bound morpheme such as -ish used to make new words or words of a different grammatical category, in contrast to an inflectional morpheme.

Ex:

• The addition of the derivational morpheme -ment changes the verb encourage to the noun encouragement

• The noun class can become the verb classify by the addition of the derivational morpheme -ify.

• Derivational morphemes can be suffixes like -ment and -ify and also prefixes, such as re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-, un-

• A bound morpheme used to indicate the grammatical function of a word, also called an “inflection”.

• These are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate the grammatical function of a word.

EX:

• 's Possessive The boy's house.

• -s Third-person singular He mows the grass.

• -s Plural The houses on our street.

• -ed Past tense She lived next door.

• -ing Present participle They're moving soon.

• -er Comparative He's the quieter neighbor.

• -est Superlative We're the quietest neighbors.

• -en past particible