Bound morphemes

•Bound morphemes (affixes) must be

attached to the word.
•They can’t stand alone as words;
•They are prefixes, infixes, suffixes
and circumfixes, such as {clude} as in
include, exclude, preclude) or they may
be grammatical (such as {PLU} = plural
as in boys, girls, and cats).
Free morphemes

 Free morphemes are those that can

stand alone as words.

 Example:    girl, system, desire,

hope, act, phone, happy
Root morphemes
 A root is a morpheme that
cannot be analyzed into smaller
parts.
 Example: cran (as in cranberry),

act, beauty, system, etc..

Stem morphemes

•A stem is formed when a root

morpheme is combined with an affix.
•Other affixes can be added to a
stem to form a more complex stem. 
Ex: govern [root]; governable [stem]
Ungovernable (more complex[stem])
Content and Function Morphemes
 Content morphemes carry some semantic content

For example car, -able, un-.

 Function morphemes act solely to provide

grammatical information and syntactic agreement.

Examples: and, on, but, plural –s

 Note that these are not simply different names for the
derivational/inflectional distinction { D/I}
 morphemes can be bound, while content/function
 morphemes may be free as well (e.g, prepositions
 are free function morphemes)
Example of word formation

 Root      believe (verb)

 Stem    believe + able (verb + suffix)
 Word     un + believe + able
(prefix +verb + suffix)  
Example of word formation

 Root system
 Stem system + atic
 Stem un + system + atic
 Stem un + system + atic + al
 Wordun + system + atic + al + ly