INTRODUCTION

What is grammar?
We use the term “grammar’ with a systematic ambiguity. On the one
hand, the term refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and
proposed as a description of the speaker’s competence. On the other hand, [it
refers] to this competence itself.
N. Chomsky and M. Halle. The sound pattern of English.
Teaching grammars
The grammar of language is different from a teaching grammar, which is
used to learn another language dialect. In countries where it is advantageous to
speak a ‘prestige’ dialect, people do not speak it natively may wish to learn it.
Teaching grammars states explicitly the rules of the language, lists the words
and their pronunciation, and aid in leaning a new language or dialect. As an
adult, it is difficult to learn a second language without being instructed.
Teaching grammars assume that the student already knows one language and
compares the grammar of the target language with the grammar of the native
language. The meaning of a word is given by providing a gloss. – the parallel
word in the student’s native language, such as maison ‘house’. It is assumed
that the student knows the meaning of the gloss ‘house’ and so the meaning of
the French word maison.
We are all intimately familiar with at least one language, our own; yet
few of us ever stop to consider what we know about it. There is no book that
contains the English or Russian or Zulu language. The words of a language can
be listed in a dictionary, but not all the sentences and a language consist of these
sentences as well as words. Speakers use a finite set of rules to produce and
understand an infinite set of possible sentences.
These rules comprise the grammar of a language, which is learned when
you acquire the language and includes the sound system (the Phonology), how
words may be combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), ways in which
sounds and meanings are related (the semantics), and the words or lexicon. The

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sounds and meanings of these words are related in an arbitrary fashion. If you
had ever heard the word syntax you would not, by its sounds, know what it
meant. Language, then, is a system that relates sounds with meanings, and when
you know a language you know this system.
This knowledge (linguistic competence) is different from behaviour
(linguistic performance). If you woke up one morning and decided to stop
talking (as the Trappist monks do after they take a ‘vow of silence’), you would
still have knowledge of your language. This ability or competence underlies
linguistic behaviour. If you do not know the language, you cannot speak it; but
if you know the language, you may choose not to speak.
Grammars are the three kinds. The descriptive grammar of a language
represents the unconscious linguistic knowledge or capacity of its speakers.
Such a grammar is a model of the ‘mental grammar’ every speaker of the
language knows. It does not teach the rules of the language; it describes the
rules that are already known. A grammar that attempt to legislate what your
grammar should be is called a prescriptive grammar. It prescribes; it does not
describe, except incidentally. Teaching grammars are written to help people
learn a foreign language or a dialect of their own language.
Knowing a language means knowing what sounds are in that language
and what sounds are not. This unconscious knowledge is revealed by the way
speakers of one language pronounce words from another language. However,
knowing the sounds and patterns in our language constitutes only one part of
our linguistic knowledge. In addition, knowing a language is knowing that
certain sound sequences signify certain concepts or meanings. Speakers of
English know what boy means something different from toy or girl or
pterodactyl. Knowing a language is therefore knowing how to relate sounds and
meanings.
The range of constructions that is studied by grammar is very large, and
grammarians have often divided it into sub-fields. The oldest and most widely
-used division is that between morphology and syntax.

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Diagram 1 The division of subfields of linguistics

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 UNIT 1: MORPHOLOGY

As the diagram shows, morphology is the branch of grammar that studies

the structure of words and word formation. The word morphology itself comes
from the Greek word morpheme, which means “form’. Morphology is to words
what syntax is to sentences. That is, morphology is concerned with the structure
of words just as syntax is concerned with the structure of sentences. In the
following list, all the words except the last can be divided into parts, each of
which has some kind of independent meaning.
unhappiness un - happi - ness
horses horse - s
talking talk-ing
yes yes
Yes has no internal grammatical structure. We could analyse its
constituent sounds, / j /, / e /, / s /, but none of these has a meaning in isolation.
By contrast, horse, talk, and happy, plainly have a meaning, as do the elements
attached to them (the ‘affixes’): un- carries a negative meaning; -ness expresses
a state to convey a sense of duration. The smallest meaningful elements into
which words can be analysed are known as morphemes; and the way
morphemes operate in language provides the subject matter of morphology.

Further reading
Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of
words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.)
While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is
clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by
rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and
dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from
their tacit knowledge of the rules of word-formation in English. They intuit that
dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to
dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or

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regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those
smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of
linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages,
and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of
those languages.
Models of morphology
There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture
the distinctions above in different ways. These are:
- Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement
approach.
- Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-
Process approach.
- Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-
Process approach. Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a
Word-and-Paradigm approach.
Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in
that list is very strong, it is not absolute.
Morpheme-based morphology
In morpheme-based morphology, word-forms are analyzed as arrangements of
morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a
language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-,
depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this
case, derivational affixes. In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and
that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of analyzing word-forms as if they
were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called
Item-and-Arrangement.
The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology
usually think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to
such an extent that very often beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable,
fundamental notion of morphology, and many five-minute explanations of

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morphology are, in fact, five-minute explanations of morpheme-based
morphology. This is, however, not so. The fundamental idea of morphology is
that the words of a language are related to each other by different kinds of rules.
Analyzing words as sequences of morphemes is a way of describing these
relations, but is not the only way. In actual academic linguistics, morpheme-
based morphology certainly has many adherents, but is by no means the
dominant approach.
Lexeme-based morphology
Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead
of analyzing a word-form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word-
form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem in
order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is
required by the rule, and outputs a word-form; a derivational rule takes a stem,
changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a
compounding rule takes word-forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.
Word-based morphology
Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-paradigm approach. This
theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine
morphemes into word-forms, or to generate word-forms from stems, word-
based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of
inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such
generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The
examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a
word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme,
corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third
person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this
situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-
and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these,
because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one
for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns

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out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole words
that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized
based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new
ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used
historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where
older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing
kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). While a Word-
and-Paradigm approach can explain this easily, other approaches have difficulty
with phenomena such as this.

1. The word as the minimal free form of language

Most linguists believe that the word is best defined in terms of the way in
which it patterns syntactically. One widely accepted definition of this type is as
follows:
A word is a minimal free form because it is an element that can occur in
isolation and/or whose position with respect to neighboring elements is not
entirely fixed. For example, the sound sequence /h˄ntәz / hunters is a word and
can occur in different positions within the sentence, as shown below:
The hunters pursued the bear.
The bear was pursued by the hunters.
In contrast, the units -er and - s do not count as words here since they
cannot occur in isolation and their positioning with respect to adjacent elements
is completely fixed. Thus, we cannot say * erhunt or “serhunt, but only hunters.
Hunters is a minimal free form because a larger unit such as the hunters cannot
be identified as a single word but as a phrase or group of words. Although this
unit can function independently and can occur in different positions in a
sentence, it is not a minimal free form since it consists of two smaller free forms
- the and hunter.
So, while such units as hunters can be treated as a minimal free from we
should seek the answers for treating the meaningful units such as -er and -s in

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the sound sequence hunters in terms of their distinctive features and their roles
in the word. These linguistic units are called morphemes which will be defined
in the sections below.
Further reading
A word is a unit which is a constituent at the phrase level and above. It is
sometimes identifiable according to such criteria as:
- being the minimal possible unit in a reply
- having features such as:
+ a regular stress pattern
+ phonological changes conditioned by or blocked at word boundaries
+ being the largest unit resistant to insertion of new constituents within its
boundaries, or
+ being the smallest constituent that can be moved within a sentence
without making the sentence ungrammatical.
A word is sometimes placed, in a hierarchy of grammatical constituents,
above the morpheme level and below the phrase level.
Words sit uneasily at the boundary between morphology and syntax. In
some languages – ‘isolating’ languages, such as Vietnamese – they are plainly
low-level units, with little or no internal structure. In others – ‘polysynthetic’
languages, such as Eskimo – words-like units are highly complex forms,
equivalent to whole sentences. The concept of ‘word’ thus ranges from such
single sounds as English a topalyamunurringkujamunurtu (‘He/she definitely
did not become bad’) in the Western Desert language of Australia.
Words are usually the easiest units to identify, in the written language. In
most languages, they are the entities that have spaces on either side. (A few
languages use word dividers (e.g. Sanskrit). Because a literate society exposes
its members to these units from early childhood, we all know where to put the
spaces – apart from a small number of problems, mainly to do with
hyphenation. Should we write washing machine or should it be washing-
machine? well informed or well-informed? no one or no-one?

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 It is more difficult to decide what words are in the stream of speech,
especially in a language that has never been written down. But there are
problems, even in languages like English or French. Certainly, it is possible to
read a sentence aloud slowly, so that we can ‘hear’ the spaces between the
words; pauses do not occur between each word, as can be seen from any
acoustic record of the way people talk. Even in very hesitant speech, pauses
come at intervals, such as phrases or clauses (p.95). So if there are no audible
‘spaces’, how do we know what the words are? Linguists have spent a great
deal of time trying to devise satisfactory criteria – none of which is entirely
successful.
Five tests of word identification:
Potential pause
Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to ‘repeat it very slowly, with
pauses’. The pauses will tend rod all between words, and not within words. For
example, the/three/little/pigs/went/to/market. But the criterion is not foolproof,
for some people will break up on syllable, e.g. mar/ket.
Indivisibility
Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to ‘add extra words’ to it. The
extra items will be added between the words and not within them. For example,
the pig went to market might become the big pig once went straight to the
market, but we would not have such forms as pi-big-g or mar-the-ket. However,
this criterion is not perfect either, in the light of such forms as absoblooming-
lutely.
Minimal free form
The American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) thought of
words as ‘minimal free forms’ – that is, the smallest units of speech that can
meaningfully stand on their town. This definition does handle the majority of
words, but it cannot cope with several items which are treated as words in
writing, but which never stand on their own in natural speech, such as English
the and of, or French je (‘I’) and de (‘of’).

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Phonetic boundaries
It is sometimes possible to tell from the sound of a word where it begins
or ends. In Welsh, for example, long words generally have their stress on the
penultimate syllable, e.g ‘cartref ‘home’, car’trefi ‘homes’. In Turkish, the
vowels within a word harmonize in quality (p.161), so that if there is a marked
change in vowel quality in the stream of speech, a new word must have begun.
But there are many exceptions to such rules.
Semantic units
In the sentence Dog bites vicar, there are plainly three units of meaning,
and each unit corresponds to a word. But language is often not as neat as this. In
“I switched on the light”, the has little clear ‘meaning’, and the single action of
‘switching on’ involves two words.
We know nothing — or almost nothing — about the mechanism by
which a speaker's mental process is converted into sound groups called "words",
nor about the reverse process whereby a listener's brain converts the acoustic
phenomena into concepts and ideas, thus establishing a two-way process of
communication.
We know very little about the nature of relations between the word and
the referent (i. e. object, phenomenon, quality, action, etc. denoted by the word).
If we assume that there is a direct relation between the word and the referent —
which seems logical — it gives rise to another question: how should we explain
the fact that the same referent is designated by quite different sound groups in
different languages.
We do know by now — though with vague uncertainty — that there is
nothing accidental about the vocabulary of the language;1 that each word is a
small unit within a vast, efficient and perfectly balanced system. But we do not
know why it possesses these qualities, nor do we know much about the
processes by which it has acquired them.

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 The list of unknowns could be extended, but it is probably high time to
look at the brighter side and register some of the things we do know about the
nature of the word.
First, we do know that the word is a unit of speech which, as such, serves
the purposes of human communication. Thus, the word can be defined as a unit
of communication.
Secondly, the word can be perceived as the total of the sounds which
comprise it.
Third, the word, viewed structurally, possesses several characteristics.
The modern approach to word studies is based on distinguishing between
the external and the internal structures of the word.
By the vocabulary of a language is understood the total sum of its words.
Another term for the same is the stock of words.
By external structure of the word we mean its morphological structure.
For example, in the word post-impressionists the following morphemes can be
distinguished: the prefixes post-, im-, the root press, the noun-forming suffixes
-ion, -ist, and the grammatical suffix of plurality -s. All these morphemes
constitute the external structure of the word post-impressionists.
The external structure of words, and also typical word-formation patterns,
are studied in the section on word-building.
The internal structure of the word, or its meaning, is nowadays commonly
referred to as the word's semantic structure. This is certainly the word's main
aspect. Words can serve the purposes of human communication solely due to
their meanings, and it is most unfortunate when this fact is ignored by some
contemporary scholars who, in their obsession with the fetish of structure tend
to condemn as irrelevant anything that eludes mathematical analysis. And this is
exactly what meaning, with its subtle variations and shifts, is apt to do.
Another structural aspect of the word is its unity. The word possesses
both external (or formal) unity and semantic unity. Formal unity of the word is
sometimes inaccurately interpreted as indivisibility. The example of post-

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impressionists has already shown that the word is not, strictly speaking,
indivisible. Yet, its component morphemes are permanently linked together in
opposition to word-groups, both free and with fixed contexts, whose
components possess a certain structural freedom, e. g. bright light, to take for
granted.
The formal unity of the word can best be illustrated by comparing a word
and a word-group comprising identical constituents. The difference between a
blackbird and a black bird is best explained by their relationship with the
grammatical system of the language. The word blackbird, which is
characterised by unity, possesses a single grammatical framing: blackbird/s.
The first constituent black is not subject to any grammatical changes. In the
word-group a black bird each constituent can acquire grammatical forms of its
own: the blackest birds I've ever seen. Other words can be inserted between the
components which is impossible so far as the word is concerned as it would
violate its unity: a black night bird.
The same example may be used to illustrate what we mean by semantic
unity. In the word-group a black bird each of the meaningful words conveys a
separate concept: bird - a kind of living creature; black - a colour.
The word blackbird conveys only one concept: the type of bird. This is
one of the main features of any word: it always conveys one concept, no matter
how many component morphemes it may have in its external structure.
A further structural feature of the word is its susceptibility to grammatical
employment. In speech, most words can be used in different grammatical forms
in which their interrelations are realised.
So far we have only underlined the word's major peculiarities, but this
suffices to convey the general idea of the difficulties and questions faced by the
scholar attempting to give a detailed definition of the word. The difficulty does
not merely consist in the considerable number of aspects that are to be taken
into account, but, also, in the essential unanswered questions of word theory
which concern the nature of its meaning.

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 All that we have said about the word can be summed up as follows.
The word is a speech unit used for the purposes of human
communication, materially representing a group of sounds, possessing a
meaning, susceptible to grammatical employment and characterised by formal
and semantic unity.

2. Morpheme and allomorph

Words, though they may be definable as minimal free forms, are not the
minimal meaningful units of language we are looking for, since they can often
be broken down further. As we can see, the word hunters consists of three
meaningful parts: hunt, -er and –s. The traditional term for these minimal
meaningful units is sign. A more common term in linguistics is morpheme.
Morpheme can be defined as the smallest meaningful unit of language
(any part of a word that cannot be broken down further into smaller meaningful
parts, including the whole word itself). The word 'hunters' can be broken down
into three meaningful parts: 'hunt'; ‘-er’ and the plural suffix '-s'; neither of these
can be broken down into smaller parts that have a meaning. Therefore 'hunt';
-‘er’ and '-s' are all morphemes.
In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic
unit that has a semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are
composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound),
and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest
units of written language).
E.g. the word ‘hunters’ is composed of 5 phonemes / h /; /˄/; /n/; /t/; /ә/ and /z/;
but this word is composed of 6 graphemes ‘h’, ‘u’, ‘n’, ‘t, ‘e’, ‘r’ and ‘s’.
The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many
morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can
stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its
actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the
same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.

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English example:
The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-" (meaning not x), a
bound morpheme; "-break-", a free morpheme; and "-able", a bound morpheme.
"un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.
The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", IPA: [s], in cats ([kæts]), but "-es",
[-әz/ iz], in dishes ([disiz]), and even the voiced "-s", [z], in dogs ([dɒgz]).
These are the allomorphs of "-s". It might even change entirely into -ren in
children.
Thus, allomorphs are phonetic variants of a morpheme in a particular context,
e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as [-z], [-s ] or [-әz/Iz].
3. Types of morphemes
Morphemes can be classified according to a variety of ways.
3.1. Lexical and Grammatical morphemes
The distinction between lexical and grammatical morphemes is not well
defined although many linguists seem to agree that it is a useful division to
make. Lexical morphemes (also content morpheme) have a sense (i.e. meaning)
in and of themselves. A lexical morpheme has a relatively more specific
meaning than a grammatical or function morpheme. A lexical morpheme
names a concept/idea in our record of experience of the world (e.g. boy and big
are typical of lexical morphemes. Content morphemes fall into the classes of
noun, verb, adjective, adverb. Grammatical morphemes (function morphemes),
on the other hand, don’t really have a sense in and of themselves; instead, they
express some sort of relationship between lexical morphemes. Function
morphemes generally fall into classes such as articles ('a', 'the'), prepositions
('of', 'at'), auxiliary verbs ('was eating', 'have slept'), etc. Prepositions, articles
and conjunctions (e.g. of, the, and but…) are typical of grammatical
morphemes.
3.2. Free and Bound morphemes
In contrast to the division between lexical and grammatical morphemes,
the distinction between free and bound morphemes is straightforward. Free

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morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone as an independent word. They
may be lexical (e.g. 'item'). Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with
other lexical items (as in town hall or dog house).
Bound morphemes (or affixes), on the other hand, are morphemes that
cannot stand alone as an independent word, but must be attached to another
morpheme/word (affixes, such as plural '-s', are always bound). Roots are
sometimes bound, e.g. the 'kep-' of 'kept' or the '-ceive' of 'receive'. Bound
morphemes like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a
lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes.
Unproductive, non-affix morphemes that exist only in bound form are known as
"cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word.
3.3. Root and Affixes
Affixes are bound morphemes which attach to a base (root or stem).
Prefixes attach to the front of a base; suffixes to the end of a base; infixes are
inserted inside of a root. An example of a prefix is 're-' of 'rewrite'; of a suffix, '-
al' of 'critical'.
3.4. Base, Stem and Root morphemes
Another distinction between base, stem and root morphemes can be said
to be still controversial among linguists. Root morphemes are (usually free)
morphemes around which words can be built up through the addition of affixes.
The root usually has a more specific meaning than the affixes that attach to it.
For example, the root 'kind' can have affixes added to it to form 'kindly',
'kindness', 'kinder', 'kindest'. The root is the item you have left when you strip
all other morphemes off a complex word. In the word dehumanizing, for
example, if you strip off all the affixes -ing, -ize, and de-, human is what you
have left. It cannot be divided further into meaningful parts. It is the root of the
word.
Base can be defined as an element (free or bound, root morpheme or
complex word) to which additional morphemes are added. It is also called a
stem. A base can consist of a single root morpheme, as with 'kind' of 'kindness'.

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But a base can also be a word that itself contains more than one morpheme. For
example, we can use the word 'kindness' as a base to form the word 'kindnesses';
to make 'kindnesses', we add the plural morpheme, spelled '-es' in this case, to
the base 'kindness'.
3.5. Inflectional and Derivational morphemes
This distinction applies only to the class of bound, grammatical
morphemes. The more familiar term for the class of bound grammatical
morphemes is affix consisting of prefix and suffix as mentioned above.
Derivational morphemes are those that can be added to a word to create
(derive) another word with new meaning and/or new syntactic category. For
example, the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."
Inflectional morphemes do not change the meaning or syntactic
category of a word. They just modify a word’s form to mark the sub-
grammatical classes to which this word belongs. An inflectional morpheme can
mark a word's grammar category such as tense, number, aspect, and so on (e.g.
plural marker -s as in the word dogs or possessive marker ‘s as in Tom’s car).
Besides these distinctions, morphemes can be defined in terms of their
position within the word as prefix (the ones that occur in front of a base form);
suffix (the one that is added to the end of the base form). The main classes of
bound morphemes are the prefixes and suffixes; but infixes are also possible -
an infix which is inserted within a stem. The nearest we get to this in English is
emphatic forms such as abso-blooming-lutely awful. Other instances of this kind
of affixes can be found with expletives, providing a kind of extra emphasis, as
in the following examples:
guaran-damn-tee
abso-bloody-lutely

3.6. The difference between Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes

Lexical morphemes can be distinguished from grammatical morphemes
according to the following criteria:

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 1) Morphemic status:
Lexical morphemes tend to come as free, independent words.
Grammatical morphemes tend to appear as bound morphemes or affixes
(prefixes or suffixes).
2) Word size:
Lexical morphemes tend to be large (long).
Grammatical morphemes tend to be small (short).
3) Stress:
A lexical morpheme in English carries one primary word-stress.
Grammatical morphemes tend to be unstressed.
4) Meaning:
Lexical morphemes tend to be semantically complex with a cluster of
highly specific semantic features. Grammatical morphemes tend to be
semantically simple to code a single general feature.
5) Class size:
Lexical morphemes come in a few large class. Grammatical morphemes
come in many small classes.
6) Membership:
The membership of a lexical class is relatively open; new members join
regularly and old members drop out. The membership of a grammatical
morpheme is relatively closed and
grammatical change is usually involved when members are added or subtracted.
7) Function:
Grammatical morphemes partake in making structure of clause. The
function of lexical morphemes is to create new words from existing ones.
Criterion morphemic word stress meaning class membership function
status size size
Lexical free large stressed complex large open knowledge
morpheme
Gram. bound small un- simple small closed grammar

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morpheme

3.7. Morpheme problems

Not all words can be analysed into morphemes so easily. In English, for
example, it is difficult to know how to analyse irregular nouns, and verbs: feet is
the plural of foot, but it is not obvious how to identify a plural morpheme in the
word, analogous to the -s ending of horses. Another example is that the extra - r
turns up in the plural of child in English - child-r-en. This extra -r in English
word form children does not seem belong to anywhere. Its use is automatic in
this word. Effects of this kind complicate morphological analysis - and add to
its fascination.

Morphemes

Lexical Grammatical

Free Bound Free Bound

Nouns Prepositions
Verbs Articles
Adjectives Conjunctions
Inflectional Derivational
E.g. compress E.g. subvert E.g. at E.g. girls E.g. teacher
depress invert the works unhappy
repress convert and worked happiness
suppress pervert but taller happily

Figure 1. Division of morphemes into various types

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PRACTICE EXERCISES

Ex.1. Consider the following words and answer the questions below.
a) loneliness b) White House c) unreliable d) anti-aging pills
e) immobility f) sweeteners g) easiest h) hunger strikers
i) unhappiness j) lovelier k) optionality l) independently
Group the morphemes of these words into free morphemes and bound
morphemes and state whether the bound morphemes are derivational or
inflectional affixes.
The first two words (loneliness and White House) have been done for you
Bound morpheme
Word Free morpheme Derivational affix Inflectional affix
lone ly, ness Ø
Loneliness
White House White, house Ø Ø

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