Morphology-L4

Morpheme PKD

Free Morpheme

Bound Morpheme
Zero Morpheme
A free morpheme is the morpheme that can occur on its own in the Zero morphemes are those morphemes which are physically not
language. For example: boy, cat, on, the, an, horse, car etc. present in the word, yet fulfill the grammatical requirement of
the language. For example:
Sg pl Sg Pl
Sheep -Æ Sheep+O Boy Boy+s

Fish -Æ Fish+O Vs Cat Cat+s

Deer -Æ Deer+O Dog Dog+s
Grammatical Morpheme Lexical Morpheme

CLOSED CLASS OPEN CLASS Unlike Zero morphemes,

Empty morphemes are those
morphemes which are there in
The morphemes of this category are Rest of the entries the word as far the form is
called ‘closed class’ morphemes in a Dictionary Empty MorphemeÆ concerned but they do not have
because the number of these any meaning. Examples:
morphemes remain limited. For a) personÆ person + al
examples: English still has only three b) tribe Æ trib-e + al
articles even when it passed thru three
stages of development. Other examples
Portmanteau Morpheme O
of this class are prepositions, pronouns
etc. Affixes But
A bound morpheme which has more than one c) fact Æ fact + u + al
meaning, e.g. V+s/ -es, here ‘-es’ has at least d) senseÆ sens-e+u+al
two meaning, 3rd Person & Singular.
Infixes Also the Luganda examples in this context
O
Prefixes
In (c)&(d), the bound
Suffixes Circumfixes morpheme -u- is the case of
Empty morpheme.