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MorphemeA morpheme is “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.” Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural, for example.

In the sentence The police reopened the investigation, the word reopened consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit of meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is re- (meaning ‘again’) and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed (indicating past tense). The word tourists also contains three morphemes. There is one minimal unit of meaning tour, another minimal unit of meaning -ist (marking ‘person who does something’), and a minimalunit of grammatical function -s (indicating plural).

Free and bound morphemes

Free morphemes - morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for example, open and tour

- separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.

Bound morphemes - cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s.

- all affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in English are bound morphemes.

When free morphemes are used with bound morphemes attached, the basic word forms are technically known as stems. For example:

undressed carelessnessun- dress -ed care -less -nessprefix stem suffix stem suffix suffix(bound) (free) (bound) (free) (bound) (bound)

There are a number of English words in which the element treated as the stem is not, in fact, a free morpheme. In words such as receive, reduce and repeat, we can identify the bound morpheme re- at the beginning, but the elements -ceive, -duce and -peat are not separate word forms and hence cannot be free morphemes. These types of forms are sometimes described as ‘bound stems’ to keep them distinct from ‘free stems’ such as dress and care.

Lexical and functional morphemes

Free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that we think of as the words that carry the ‘content’ of the messages we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes and some examples are: girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look, follow, break. We can addnew lexical morphemes to the language rather easily, so they are treated as an ‘open’ class of words.Other types of free morphemes are called functional morphemes. Examples are and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a ‘closed’ class of words.

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Categories and subcategories of words and morphemes

The different types of words are variously called parts of speech, word classes, or lexical categories. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language gives this list of 8 for English:

noun pronoun verb adjective 

adverb conjunction preposition interjection

Relationship between words and morphemes

What is the relationship between words and morphemes? It's a hierarchical one: a word is made up of one or more morphemes. Most commonly, these morphemes are strung together, or concatenated, in a line. However, it is not uncommon to find non-concatenative morphemes in other languages than English. 

Word structure

Simple word:– consists of only one morpheme, e.g.: boy, man, radio, book, paper, magnet, house, compute Complex word:– contains more than one morpheme (i.e. ≥2 morphemes), e.g.: computer, boys, radio-recorder, bookshelf, magnetizeNote: a complex word may show both inflection and derivation!

Derivational and inflectional morphemes

Derivational morphemes - We use these bound morphemes to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For example, the addition of thederivational morpheme -ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness.The noun care can become the adjectives careful or careless by the addition of the derivational morphemes -ful or -less. derivational morphemes are e.g. suffixes: -ish in foolish, -ly in quickly, -ment in payment. prefixes: re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-, un-, etc.

Inflectional morphemes - These are not used to produce new words in the language, butrather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form. English has only eight inflectional morphemes (or ‘inflections’), illustrated in the following sentences.

Jim’s two sisters are really different.One likes to have fun and is always laughing.The other liked to read as a child and has always taken things seriously.One is the loudest person in the house and the other is quieter than a mouse.

From these examples, we can see that two of the inflections, -’s (possessive) and -s (plural), are attached to nouns. There are four inflections attached to verbs, -s (3rd person singular), -ing (present participle), -ed (past tense) and -en (past participle). There are two inflections

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attached to adjectives: -est (superlative) and -er (comparative). In English, all the inflectional morphemes are suffixes.

Noun + -’s, -sVerb + -s, -ing, -ed, -enAdjective + -est, -er

There is some variation in the form of these inflectional morphemes. For example, the possessive sometimes appears as -s’ (those boys’bags) and the past participle as -ed (they have finished).

An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. For example, both old and older are adjectives. However, a derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word. The verb teach becomes the noun teacher if we add the derivational morpheme –er. So, the suffix -er in modern English can be an inflectional morpheme as part of an adjective and also a distinct derivational morpheme as part of a noun. Just because they look the same (-er) doesn’t meanthey do the same kind of work.Whenever there is a derivational suffix and an inflectional suffix attached to the same word, they always appear in that order. First the derivational (-er) is attached to teach, then the inflectional (-s) is added to produce teachers.e.g.In the sentence The child’s wildness shocked the teachers, we can identify eleven morphemes.

The child -’s wild -nessfunctional lexical inflectional lexical derivational

shock -ed the teach -er -slexical inflectional functional lexical derivational inflectional

A useful way to remember all these different types of morphemes is in thefollowing chart.

lexical (child, teach)free

functional (and, the) morphemes

derivational (re-, -ness) bound

inflectional (-'s, -ed )

Problems in morphological description

So far, we have only considered examples of English words in which the different morphemes are easily identifiable as separate elements. The inflectional morpheme -s is added to car and we get the plural cars. What is the inflectional morpheme that makes sheep the plural of sheep, or men the plural of man? And if -al is the derivational suffix added to the stem institution to give us institutional, then can we take -al off the word legal to get the stem leg? Unfortunately, the answer is “No”.Reason - historical influences and the effect of borrowed elements.

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Morphs and allomorphs

Just as we treated ‘phones’ as the actual phonetic realization of ‘phonemes’, we can proposemorphs as the actual forms used to realize morphemes. For example, the form cars consists of two morphs, car + -s, realizing a lexical morpheme and an inflectional morpheme (‘plural’). The form buses also consists of two morphs (bus + -es), realizing a lexical morpheme and an inflectional morpheme (‘plural’). So there are at least two morphs (-s and -es) used to realize the inflectional morpheme ‘plural’. Just as we noted that there were ‘allophones’ of a particular phoneme, we can recognize the existence of allomorphs of a particular morpheme. That is, when we find a group of different morphs, all versions of one morpheme, we can use the prefix ‘allo-’ (= one of a closely related set) and describe them as allomorphs of that morpheme.

Take the morpheme ‘plural’. Note that it can be attached to a number of lexical morphemes to produce structures like ‘cat + plural’, ‘bus + plural’‘sheep + plural’ and ‘man + plural’. In each of these examples, the actual forms of the morphs that result from the morpheme ‘plural’ are different. Yet they are all allomorphs of the one morpheme. So, in addition to -s and -es,another allomorph of ‘plural’ in English seems to be a zero-morph because the plural form of sheep is actually ‘sheep + Ø’. When we look at ‘man + plural’, we have a vowel change in the word (æ → ε) as the morph that produces the so-called ‘irregular’ plural form men.Or: ‘past tense’- common pattern in ‘walk + past tense’ that produces walked vs. special pattern that takes ‘go + past tense’ and produces the ‘irregular’ past form went.

Allomorphs: Nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar. For example, the English plural morpheme can appear as [s] as in cats, [z] as in dogs, or ['Iz] as in churches. Each of these three pronunciations is said to be an allomorph of the same morpheme.An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments.

Prefixes and suffixesSome affixes have to be added to the beginning of the word (e.g. un-). These are calledprefixes. Other affixes have to be added to the end of the word (e.g. -ish) and are called suffixes. All English words formed by this derivational process have either prefixes or suffixes, or both. Thus, mislead has a prefix, disrespectful has both a prefix and a suffix, and foolishness has two suffixes.

InfixesThere is a third type of affix, not normally used in English, but found in some other languages. This is called an infix and, as the term suggests, it is an affix that is incorporated inside another word. It is occasionally used by emotionally aroused English speakers: Hallebloodylujah!, Absogoddamlutely! and Unfuckinbelievable!.In the film Wish You Were Here, the main character expresses her aggravation (at another character who keepstrying to contact her) by screaming Tell him I’ve gone to Singabloodypore!

However, a much better set of examples can be provided from Kamhmu, a language spoken in South-East Asia.

Verb Noun(‘to drill’) see srnee (‘a drill’)(‘to chisel’) toh trnoh (‘a chisel’)(‘to eat with a spoon’) hiip hrniip (‘a spoon’)(‘to tie’) hoom hrnoom (‘a thing with which to tie’)

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From these examples, we can see that there is a regular pattern whereby the infix -rn- is added to verbs to form corresponding nouns.

Constituent Structure of WordsThe constituent morphemes of a word can be organized into a branching or hierarchical structure, sometimes called a tree structure. Consider the word unusable. It contains three morphemes:

1. prefix "un-"2. verb stem "use"3. suffix "-able"

What is the structure? Is it first "use" + "-able" to make "usable", then combined with "un-" to make "unusable"? or is it first "un-" + "use" to make "unuse", then combined with "-able" to make "unusable"? Since "unuse" doesn't exist in English, while "usable" does, we prefer the first structure, which corresponds to the tree shown below.

This analysis is supported by the general behaviour of these affixes. There is a prefix "un-" that attaches to adjectives to make adjectives with a negative meaning ("unhurt", "untrue", "unhandy", etc.). And there is a suffix "-able" that attaches to verbs and forms adjectives ("believable", "fixable", "readable"). This gives us the analysis pictured above. There is no way to combine a prefix "un-" directly with the verb "use", so the other logically-possible structure won't work.

Now let's consider the word "unlockable". This also consists of three morphemes:1. prefix "un-"2. verb stem "lock"3. suffix "-able"

This time, though, a little thought shows us that there are two different meanings for this word: one corresponding to the left-hand figure, meaning "not lockable," and a second one corresponding to the right-hand figure, meaning "able to be unlocked."

 In fact, un- can indeed attach to (some) verbs: untie, unbutton, uncover, unwrap... Larry Horn (1988) points out that the verbs that permit prefixation with un-are those that effect a change in state in some object, the form with un- denoting the undoing (!) of that change.This lets us account for the two senses of "unlockable". We can combine the suffix -able with the verb lock to form an adjective lockable, and then combine the prefix un- with lockable to make a new adjective unlockable, meaning "not able to be locked". Or we can combine the prefix un- with the verb lock to form a new verb unlock, and then combine the suffix -able with unlock to form an adjective unlockable, meaning "able to be unlocked".By making explicit the different possible hierarchies for a single word, we can better understand why its meaning might be ambiguous.