Morphological structure of words Plan What is morphology.? 2

Free and Bound Morphemes

A morpheme, which can occur alone as an individual word, is called a free morpheme, whereas a morpheme which can occur only with another morpheme is called a bound morpheme. The morpheme think is a free morpheme; however, morphemes un- and –able in the word unthinkable are bound morphemes. As we mentioned before, any concrete realization of a morpheme is called a morph. A morph should not be confused with a syllable. The difference between them is that “while morphs are manifestations of morphemes and represent specific meaning, syllables are parts of words which are isolated only on the basis of pronunciation”. Other examples of a morpheme’s change when it is combined with another element can be traced in the following examples: the final segment of permit is [t] when it stands alone; however, when the word combines with the morpheme –ion, [t] changes to [∫] in the word permission. Similar alternations are found in the words:allusion, alternate/alternation, amalgamate/amalgamation, annotate/annotation, and assuage/assuasive.

Victoria A. Fromkin et al. name morphemes that represent categories of words as lexical morphemes. They refer to items (book, pen, table, etc.), actions (go, run, swim, etc.), attributes (red, fair, long, short, etc.), and concepts (theory, notion, etc.) that can be described with words or illustrated with pictures. Such morphemes as –ly, un-, -ed, -s, a, the, an, about, to, this, that, etc. are considered grammatical morphemes; the speaker uses them to signal the relationship between a word and the context in which they are used. Prepositions and determiners belong to grammatical morphemes because they express only a limited range of concepts. It should be noted that not all lexical morphemes are free morphemes, and not all grammatical morphemes are bound morphemes. Such grammatical morphemes as prepositions (about, for, to, etc.) and determiners (this, that, a, an, the, etc.) are free morphemes because they can stand alone.