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 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.

Diagram 1 The division of subfields of linguistics

 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 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
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 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 adjectivalsuperlatives) 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 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?
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’).
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.
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-
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.
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 huntersconsists 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 semanticmeaning. 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.
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
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'. 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."
Inflectionalmorphemes 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:

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
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 worksunhappy
repress convert and worked happiness
suppress pervert but tallerhappily

Figure 1. Division of morphemes into various types