MORPHEMIC AND CATEGORIAL STRUCTURE OF THE WORD

 A morpheme is the smallest meaningful and syntactical or

grammatical unit of a language that cannot be divided
without changing its actual meaning. For instance, the
word ‘love’ is a morpheme; but if you eliminate any
character such as ‘e’ then it will be meaningless or lose
the actual meaning of love.
 Now we can say a morpheme is the smallest grammatical
unit of a language by which meaningful words are formed.
However, this is how we may define ‘what is a morpheme
in linguistics?
 Types of Morphemes
 The morphemes are of two types. They are:
 Free Morphemes
 Bound Morphemes
 1. Free Morphemes
 A morpheme that has individual meaning and can be
formed independently is called a free morpheme. For
example; free, get, human, song, love, happy, sad, may,
much, but, and, or, some, above, when, etc.
 All of the words have individual meanings and all of them
are free morphemes. Free morphemes can be categorized
into two sub-types. They are:
 Lexical morphemes
 Grammatical and functional morphemes
 Lexical Morphemes
 The lexical morphemes are those morphemes that are
large in number and independently meaningful. The
lexical morphemes include nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
 These types of free morphemes are called lexical
morphemes. For example; dog, good, honest, boy, girl,
woman, excellent, etc.
 Grammatical or Functional Morphemes
 The grammatical or functional morphemes are those
morphemes that consist of functional words in a language
such as prepositions, conjunctions determiners, and
pronouns. For example; and, but, or, above, on, into,
after, that, the, etc.
 2. Bound Morphemes
 A morpheme that doesn’t have any independent meaning
and can be formed with the help of free morphemes is
called a bound morpheme.
 For example; less, ness, pre, un, en, ceive, ment.
 Inflectional Affixes
 Inflectional morphemes are not used to produce new words
rather indicate the aspects of the grammar function of the
word.
 For instance, inflectional morphemes are indicated whether a
word is singular or plural if it is past tense or not, and if it is
comparative or possessive forms. English has eight Inflectional
morphemes all of which are suffixes.
 English Inflectional morphemes affixes:
 Nouns:
 Plural (-s): The courses.
 Possessive: Jack‘s courses.
 Verbs:
 3rd person singular number non-past (-s):
 Jack teaches English well.
 He reaches the place on time.
 Possessive (-ing):
 He is writing.
 She is singing.
 Past participle (-en/ed):
 He has written the book.
 He worked
 Adjectives:
 Comparative: (-er): John is happier than before.
 Superlative: (-est): He is the tallest person in the class.
 1. Morphemes are of--- types
 three
 two
 four
 2. A morpheme that has individual meaning is a--- morpheme
 free morpheme
 bound roots
 bound morpheme
 3. A morpheme that doesn’t have any independent meaning is a--- morpheme
 lexical morpheme
 free morpheme
 bound morpheme
 Categorial structure of the word
 The word combines in its semantic structure two meanings –
lexical and grammatical. Lexical meaning is the individual
meaning of the word. Grammatical meaning is the meaning of
the whole class or a subclass. Thus, categorial grammatical
meanings are the most general meanings rendered by language
and expressed by systemic correlations of word-forms.
 The grammatical meaning may be of several types (Fig. 18). It
may be explicit and implicit. The implicit grammatical meaning
is not expressed formally.
 +The explicit grammatical meaning is always marked
morphologically – it has its marker.
 The implicit grammatical meaning may be of two types –
general and dependent. The general grammatical meaning
is the meaning of the whole word-class, of a part of
speech. The dependent grammatical meaning is the
meaning of a subclass within the same part of speech.
 Grammatical categories are made up by the unity of
identical grammatical meanings that have the same form.
Thus, the grammatical category is a system of expressing
a generalized grammatical meaning by means of
paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms.
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