Phonemes

• A phoneme is the smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning.

• These units are identified within the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

• Australian English uses 47 symbols to describe the consonant, monophthong and diphthong sounds used regularly by its speakers.

Morphemes

• A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.

• A morpheme can be an entire word, or its constituent parts.

• The way morphemes operate in language provides the subject matter of morphology.

• Morphology refers to the branch of linguistics concerned with word formation i.e. how words are structured.

• The term morphology comes from the Greek word ‘form’ or ‘shape’

Morphology

Types of Morpheme

• There are two types of morpheme – free or bound.

• Free morphemes can exist on their own within a sentence – school, boy, lady, like.

• Bound morphemes cannot exist on their own. They must attach to a free morpheme as an affix (prefix or suffix): dis-, anti-, -s.

Classes of Bound Morpheme

• There are two classes of bound morpheme – inflectional and derivational.

• Inflectional morphemes modify the grammatical class of words by signaling a change in number, person, gender, tense, and so on, but they do not shift the base form into another part of speech.

• Derivational morphemes constitute the second class of morphemes and they modify a word according to its lexical and grammatical class. They result in more profound changes on base words, which can include a change of word class.

Inflectional Morphemes

• Inflectional morphemes provide grammatical information, but they do not change the meaning of a word or its part of speech.

-s plural (nouns)

-‘s possessive (nouns)

-er comparative (adjectives)

-est superlative (adjectives)

-s 3rd person singular present (verbs)

-ed past tense (verbs)

-ing present participle (verbs)

-en past participle (verbs)

Derivational Morphemes

• Derivational morphemes are affixes that can change the meaning of a word to create a new one.

Vaccine + ate = Vaccinate (Noun to Verb)

Sing + er = Singer (Verb to Noun)

Quiet + ly = Quietly (Adjective to Adverb)

Pink + ish = Pinkish (Adjective to Adjective)