6. Bound and free Morphemes

Prefixis and Suffixis. One of the things we know about particular morphemes is whether they can stand alone or whether they must be attached to a host morpheme.

Some morphemes like boy, desire, gentle, and man may constitute words by them­selves. These are free morphemes. Other morphemes like -ish, -ness, -ly, dis-, trans-, and un- are never words by themselves but are always parts of words. These affixes are bound morphemes. We know whether each affix precedes or follows other mor­phemes. Thus, un-, pre- (premeditate, prejudge), and bi- (bipolar) are pre­fixes. They occur before ether morphemes. Some morphemes occur only as suffixes, following other morphemes. English examples of suffix morphemes are -ing (e.g., sleep­ing, eating, running, climbing), -er (e.g., singer, performer, reader, and beautifier), -ist (e.g., typist: copyist, pianist, novelist, collaborationist, and linguist), and -ly (e.g., manly, sickly, spectacularly, and friendly), to mention only a few.

Morphemes are the minimal linguistic signs in all languages and many languages have prefixes and suffixes. But languages may differ in how they deploy their mor­phemes. A morpheme that is a prefix in one language may be a suffix in another and vice-versa. In English the plural morpheme -s is a suffix (e.g., boys, machines, diskettes).

ROOTS AND STEMS. Morphologically complex words consist of a root and one or more affixes. A root is a lexical content morpheme that cannot be analyzed into smaller parts. Some examples of English roots are paint in painter, read in reread, and ceive in conceive. A root mayor may not stand alone as a word (paint does; ceive doesn’t).

When a root morpheme is combined with an affix, it forms a stem, which may or may not be a word (painter is both a word and a stem; -ceive + er is only a stem). Other affixes can be added to a stem to form a more complex stem, as shown in the following:

Root Chomsky (proper) noun

Stem Chomsky + ite noun + suffix

Word Chomsky + ite + s noun + suffix + suffix

As one adds each affix to a stem, a new stem and a new word are formed.

7. Grammatical morphemes.

In derivational morphology certain morphemes such as -ceive or -mit have meaning only when combined with other morphemes in a word, for example transmit, remit, receive, and deceive. Similarly, there are morphemes that have "meaning" only in combination with other words in a sentence. For example, what is the meaning of it in "It's hot in July" or "The Archbishop found it advisable". Function words such as it and to have a strictly grammatical meaning, or function, in the sentence. This means that they do not have any clear lexical meaning or concept associated with them. They are in the sentence because they are required by the rules of sentence formation – the syntax. For example, to in connection with a verb has the grammatical function of making the sentence an infini­tive.

Inflectional Morphemes. Function words like to, it, and be are free morphemes. Many languages, including En­glish, also have bound morphemes that have a strictly grammatical function. They mark properties such as tense, number, gender, case, and so forth. Such bound morphemes are called inflectional morphemes. They never change the syntactic category of the words or morphemes to which they are attached. Consider the forms of the verb in the follow­ing sentences:

(1) I sail the ocean blue.

(2) He sails the ocean blue.

(3) John sailed the ocean blue.

English Inflectional Morphemes

-s third-person singular present

-ed past tense

-ing progressive

-en past participle

-s plural

-'s possessive

-er comparative

-est superlative

Compared to many languages of the world, English has relatively little inflectional morphology.

How are derivational morphemes as opposed to inflec­tional ones? The simplest answer is that de­rivational morphemes are affixes that are not inflectional. Inflectional morphemes signal grammatical relations and are required by the rule of sentence formation.

Derivational morphemes, when affixed to roots and stems, change the grammatical word class and/or the basic meaning of the word, which may then be inflected as to number (singular or plural), tense (present, past, future), and so on.