Introducing English Linguistics

Free and bound morphemes
Morphemes can be 
free
or 
bound
. If a morpheme is free, it can stand on
its own; if it is bound, it must be attached to a free morpheme. In the word
walking, the morpheme walk is free because it can stand alone as a word.
However, -ing is bound because it has to be attached to a lexical verb, in
this case walk. In the examples below, the free morphemes are in italics
and the bound morphemes in boldface:
force-ful
dis
-like
miss-ed
pre
-judge
un
-like-li-est
mis
-inform-ation
As the above examples illustrate, a word will typically consist of a single
free morpheme, sometimes referred to as the base. The base, as Plag (2003:
11) states, is “The part of a word which an affix is attached to.” However,
some words may contain more than one base, and some bases are
(arguably) a bound rather than a free morpheme.
The morpheme
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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Compound words will always contain two bases. The word upon is com-
posed of two prepositions: up and  on. The word bookshelf contains two
nouns: book and shelf. Many words of Latin origin have a base that is no
longer a free morpheme. Consider the words perceive, receive, and conceive.
Each of these words was borrowed whole into English from Anglo-French.
However, the words themselves contain the root -ceive, which has its ori-
gins in Latin capere meaning ‘to take.’ Thus, perceive means literally per
‘thoroughly’ 
 capere ‘to take.’ Does this mean that perceive and the other
words above should be analyzed as containing two bound morphemes?
Certainly,  per- is more recognizable as an independent morpheme in
other English words such as perennial, which means ‘throughout the
year.’ But for the average speaker of English, perceive, receive, and conceive
are interpreted as containing a single free morpheme. Whatever mean-
ing the individual parts of these words once had has been lost over time.
Therefore, unless one is interested in analyzing the etymology of the indi-
vidual parts of these words, they are best analyzed as containing one free
morpheme.
There is also the issue of whether words such as the or  more can truly
stand alone. Matthews (1991: 11–12) questions the status of words such as
these as free morphemes, since they are never used alone: the article the,
for instance, is always associated with nouns. Nevertheless, unless one is
willing to create an intermediate category for words such as these – a cat-
egory on a continuum between free and bound morphemes – the words
are best regarded as free morphemes.