What’s a Morpheme?

“It’s the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning, either a word or a part of a
word”. (Cambridge Dictionary, 2023).

“Morphology is the study of words and their parts. Morphemes, like prefixes, suffixes and
base words, are defined as the smallest meaningful units of meaning. Morphemes are
important for phonics in both reading and spelling, as well as in vocabulary and
comprehension”. (Victoria State of Government, 2021)

Morpheme Classification

There are two types of morphemes-free morphemes and bound morphemes. "Free
morphemes" can stand alone with a specific meaning, for example, eat, date, weak.
"Bound morphemes" cannot stand alone with meaning. Morphemes are comprised of two
separate classes called (a) bases (or roots) and (b) affixes.

A "base," or "root" is a morpheme in a word that gives the word its principle meaning. An
example of a "free base" morpheme is woman in the word womanly. An example of a
"bound base" morpheme is -sent in the word dissent.

(SEA - Supporting English Acquisition, s. f.)

Examples
 Free Morphemes
The morpheme that can stand alone as a single word (as a meaningful unit) is called free
morpheme. The free morphemes are roots that are identical to words. Free morpheme is
set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. When a
free morpheme is used with bound morphemes, the basic word forms are technically
known as stems or roots.

Example:

Sun (noun), dog (noun), walk (verb), and happy (adjective)

Free morpheme can stand alone and cannot be subdivided further. ‘Sun’ or ‘dog’ are ‘free
morphemes because they cannot be further split up, therefore the stems that cannot
divide further are also called roots.

Free morphemes are divided into two categories: Lexical

morphemes and functional morphemes.

Lexical morphemes are set of content words like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs. They can be understood fully. Lexical morphemes depict dictionary meaning of
a word that is attributed to a specific referent.

Example: run, blue, slow, paper, small, throw, and now.

Subdivisions of lexical morphemes

Verbs: A verb is a word used to describe an action, state or occurrence.

Verbs can be used to describe an action, that’s doing something.

For example, like the word ‘jumping’ in this sentence: The rabbit was jumping in the field.

(BBC, 2022)

Noun: It’s a word that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance, or quality:

Example: "Doctor," "coal," and "beauty" are all nouns. (Cambridge Dictionary, 2023)

Adjective: It’s a word that describes a noun or pronoun:

Example: "Big", "boring", "purple", and "obvious" are all adjectives. (Cambridge
Dictionary, 2023)

Adverbs: Adverbs are useful because they are clues on how actions are done.
That is not all, but they can also modify adjectives or other adverbs. They also
give details referring to time, manner, place o r degree. Adverbs can consist of a
word or several words (adverbial phrases) and even whole sentences .

Example: Always, Never, Often… (UNAM, N.D)

Functional Morphemes are set of functional words like conjunctions, prepositions,
articles, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, modals and quantifiers. Functional morphemes
perform as a relationship between one lexical morpheme and another. A functional
morpheme modifies the meaning, rather than supplying the root meaning of the word. It
encodes grammatical meaning, example, the players entered the ground. In this
sentence, ‘the’ is functional morpheme, which is specifying players and ground.

Example: Some examples of functional morphemes are and, near, when, on, because,
but, it, in, that, the, and above.

Subdivisions of Functional Morphemes

Conjugation: Verb conjugation refers to how a verb changes to show a different person,
tense, number or mood.

Example: To live, Lived, living, will live (Grammarly, N.D)

Prepositions: It’s a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and
expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause.

Examples: In, on, at, up, down, out, into…. (Oxford Languages, 2016)

Pronoun: A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun, often to avoid the need to repeat
the same noun over and over. Like nouns, pronouns can refer to people, things, concepts,
and places. Most sentences contain at least one noun or pronoun.

Example: Me, her, him, it, them, us… (Caulfield, J, N.D)

Articles: any of the English words "a," "an," and "the," or words in other languages that
are used in a similar way as these

Example: A, an, the (Cambridge University, 2023)

Bound Morphemes

Segments that cannot stand alone and occurs with another root/stem are called Bound
Morphemes. Bound morphemes are also called affixes (prefixes, suffixes and infixes) in
English. Two bound morpheme cannot occur together but it is necessary for a bound
morpheme to occur with a root/stem.

Examples of bound morphemes:

Opened: (Open + ed) = root + suffix

Reopen: (Re + open) = Prefix + root

Men: (Man + plural) = root + infix (infix makes a change inside a root word)
Derivational Morphemes: Derivational morphemes change the grammatical
categories of words.

For example the word ‘bake’ (verb) is a root word (free morpheme) and when we add
bound morpheme ‘er’(a suffix) with stem: it becomes baker (a noun), So the grammatical
category was changed from verb to noun.

Subdivisions of derivational Morphemes

Prefixes: Prefixes are a group of letters that change the meaning of a word when they
are added to the start. Most prefixes mean a similar thing when they're added to different
words.

Example:

1. un usually means not. For example, unhappy, unlocked, unfair

2. dis and mis usually have negative meanings. For example, disagree, disobey,
misbehave, mislead
3. re usually means again or back. For example, redo, reappear, redecorate
4. sub usually means under. For example, subheading or submarine (BBC, 2022)

Suffix: It’s a letter or group of letters added to the end of a word to make another word.

Example: Such as -ly in quickly or -ness in sadness (Oxford Dictionary, 2022)

Inflectional Morphemes: An inflectional morpheme is a suffix that is added to a
word to assign a particular grammatical property to that word.

For example, liste +ing = listening or boy+s = boys. They do not change the essential
meaning or the grammatical category of a word. Inflectional morphemes serve as
grammatical markers that indicate tense, number, possession, or comparison.

Subdivisions of Inflectional Morphemes

Plurals: It’s a form of a noun or verb that refers to more than one person or thing

Example: Apple – Apples, Man – Men, Woman – Women… (Oxford Dictionary, N.D)

Possessives: showing that something belongs to somebody/something

Example: possessive pronouns (= yours, theirs, etc.) (Oxford Dictionary, 2022)

Comparative: relating to adjectives or adverbs that express more in amount, degree or

quality, for example better, worse, slower and more difficult

Example: Taller, Smaller, Harder… (Oxford Dictionary, 2020)

Superlatives: The form of an adjective or adverb that expresses the highest degree of
something

Example: Tallest, Smallest, hardest… (Oxford Dictionary, 2023)

3rd-singular Present Agreement: Marks to agree with singular third person (his, her, it),
in the present tense.
Examples: Runs, Cooks, Does…

Past tense: The simple past tense, sometimes called the preterite, is used to talk about
a completed action in a time before now. The simple past is the basic form of past tense
in English. The time of the action can be in the recent past or the distant past and action
duration is not important.

Example: John Cabot sailed to America in 1498.

My father died last year.

He lived in Fiji in 1976.

We crossed the Channel yesterday. (EF, N.D)

Past Participle: A past participle is a word derived from a verb that can be used as an
adjective, to form perfect verb tenses, and to form the passive voice. It is one of two types
of participles, along with present participles

Example: She has forgotten the HW, I’ve been here before (Scribbr, 2022)

Present Participle: a form of a verb that in English ends in -ing and comes after
another verb to show continuous action. It is used to form the present continuous:

Example: I’m reading an article, she’s waiting for you (Cambridge University, 2022)
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