Free and bound morphemes

In the language there are free morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words. There are also bound morphemes which are those forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form (re-, -ist, -ed) and they are identified as affixes. Prefixes and suffixes are bound morphemes. The free morphemes can generally be identified as the set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs, and so on when they are used with bound morphemes attached the basic word forms are technically known as stems (un-dressed).

This type of description is partial simplification of the morphological facts of English. There are a number of English verbs in which the element treated as the stem is not in fact a free morpheme (re-ceive). We can identify the bound morpheme re- but the element –ceive-is not a separate word form and hence cannot be free morphemes. And these types of forms are sometimes described as bound stems.

Lexical and functional morphemes

Free morphemes can be divided into 2 categories:

1. Is the set of ordinary nouns and adjectives and verbs that we think of as the words that carry the content, the message we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes: break, house, pen, and phone. We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily so they are treated as an open-class of words.

2. Functional morphemes, examples and, him, in, that, it, near, on. This set consists largely of the functional words as conjunctions, prepositions, articles because they never add new functional morphemes to the language they are described as closed class of words.

Derivational and inflectional morphemes

The set of affixes which make up the category of bound morphemes can also be divided into 2 types.

1) Derivational morphemes, we use these morphemes to make new words or to make words of different grammatical category from the stem. The addition of derivational m. –ness change the adjective “good” to the noun “goodness”, the noun “care could be an adjective “careless”. A list of derivational morphemes can include suffixes –ish: foolish.

2) The second set of bound morphemes contains so called inflectional they are not used to produce new words. But rather to indicate aspects of grammatical function of a word. They are used to show if a word is plural or singular if it past tense or not if it’s a comparative or possessive form. English has only 8 inflectional morphemes or inflections.

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