The morpheme is the elementary meaningful lingual unit built up from phonemes and

used to make words. It has meaning, but its meaning is abstract, significative, not
concrete, or nominative, as is that of the word. Morphemes constitute the words;
they do not exist outside the words. Studying the morpheme we actually study the
word: its inner structure, its functions, and the ways it enters speech.
In traditional grammar, the study of the morphemic structure of the word is based
on two criteria: the positional criterion - the location of the morphemes with
regard to each other, and the semantic (or functional) criterion - the contribution
of the morphemes to the general meaning of the word.
According to these criteria morphemes are divided into root-morphemes (roots) and
affixal morphemes (affixes).
Roots express the concrete, �material� part of the meaning of the word and
constitute its central part.
Affixes express the specificational part of the meaning of the word: they specify,
or transform the meaning of the root.
Affixal specification may be of two kinds: of lexical or grammatical character.
So, according to the semantic criterion affixes are further subdivided into
lexical, or word-building (derivational) affixes, which together with the root
constitute the stem of the word, and grammatical, or word-changing affixes,
expressing different morphological categories, such as number, case, tense and
others.
With the help of lexical affixes new words are derived, or built; with the help of
grammatical affixes the form of the word is changed.
According to the positional criterion affixes are divided into prefixes, situated
before the root in the word, e.g.: under-estimate, and suffixes, situated after the
root,
e.g.: underestim-ate. Prefixes in English are only lexical: the word
underestimate is derived from the word estimate with the help of the prefix under-.

Suffixes in English may be either lexical or grammatical; e.g. in the word

underestimates -ate is a lexical suffix, because it is used to derive the verb
estimate (v) from the noun esteem (n), and �s is a grammatical suffix making the
3rd person, singular form of the verb to underestimate. Grammatical suffixes are
also called inflexions (inflections, inflectional endings).