Types of Morphemes

Types of Morphemes: Free and Bound
Morphemes
25TH OCTOBER 2017JAMES BOANER GRAMMAR
The post, Types of Morphemes: Free and Bound identifies and examines the two major
morpheme types that we have in English. There are basically two of them and they also
have their subdivisions. They are:
Free Morphemes
Bound morphemes
Let us examine each of these severally:
Free Morphemes
A free morpheme is one that can stand by itself as a single word. In other words,
it can exist independently without any obligatory association with other
morphemes. Examples include: open, boy, door, team, dance, teach, house,
look, break, sad, come, when, if, to, for, teach, say, me, you, girl, car, native,
name, cook, etc. Another name for free morphemes is the base word or stem
word or root word. We can further subdivide Free Morphemes into two
segments. Let consider this as we break down the concept of morpheme into
comprehensible bits of knowledge.
Categories of Free Morphemes

There are two categories. These are Lexical morphemes and Functional
morphemes.
Lexical Morphemes
These morphemes carry ‘content’ of messages we convey. In other words, lexical

morphemes are content words. A content word is a word that is semantically
meaningful; a word that has dictionary meaning. Examples of these words are
nouns, adjectives verbs and adverbs. They are words that belong to the Open
Class of the Parts of Speech or Word Classes in English.
Functional Morphemes
These morphemes consist mainly of the functional words in the English language
and they include words that belong to the Closed Class of the Parts of Speech or
Word Classes in English. Examples are conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns and
articles. Functional words or grammatical words do not contain meanings on
their own except when used alongside content or lexical words. They have no
dictionary meaning and only perform a grammatical function.
Bound Morphemes
Bound Morphemes are the opposites of Free Morphemes. They are morphemes
that cannot stand alone, that is, they cannot exist independently without being
joined or added to another morpheme. Examples include: -ish, -ness, -ation,
-tion, -ism, -al, -er, -s, -en, -ed, etc. When you look at the following words, they
are combinations of both free and bound morphemes: foolishness, bookish,
naturalisation, farmer, does, bags, taken, expected, etc.
Bound Morphemes are called Affixes in English. Affixes are also Bound

Morphemes. The word ‘undressed’ has two affixes, ‘un’ and ‘ed’ joined to the
free morpheme ‘dress’. The same thing goes for the word ‘carelessness’ which
has two affixes, ‘less’ and ‘ness’ attached to the base or root word ‘care’.
Types of Affixes in English

There are two types of affixes in the English Language specifically. They are
the Prefix and the Suffixor Postfix. Prefixes are affixes that come before the
base word; they are attached to the frontal position of the root words while
suffixes are attached at the final position of the root words. Infixes are attached
in between the root words, but they do not exist in English. Other languages like
Yoruba have Infixes or Interfixes. E. g.
Omokomo – omo-ki-omo (bad child)
Isekuse – ise-ku-ise (lewd conduct)
Iwakiwa – iwa-ki-iwa (bad behaviour)
Ayeraye – aye-re-aye (everlasting)
Ilenle – ile-ni-ile (bare floor)

alakala – ala-ki-ala (nightmarish dream)
However, some scholars consider words like therm-o-dynamics, therm-o-meter,

bar-o-meter, etc. in English as containing the infix ‘o’, but like we said, it is not
an established phenomenon in English.
INFLECTIONAL AND DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES
We can make a distinction within the set of bound morphemes in English. One type of bound
morphemes consists of derivational morphemes that are used to create new words or to “make words
of a different grammatical class from the stem” (Yule,
2010, p. 69).
For example, the addition of the derivational morpheme -ize changes the
adjective normal to the verb normalize. Similarly, we can derive the adjectives helpful and helpless by
adding the derivational morphemes -ful and less to the noun help.
The second type of bound morphemes consists of inflectional morphemes that are used to show some
aspects of the grammatical function of a word. We use inflectional morphemes to indicate if a word is
singular or plural, whether it is past tense or not, and whether it is a comparative or possessive form.
In fact, inflection exists in many languages, but compared to other languages of the world there is
relatively little inflection in English. Today there are only eight inflectional morphemes in English, as
shown in the image below:
Differences between Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes
There are some differences between inflectional and derivational morphemes.

First, inflectional morphemes never change the grammatical category (part of speech) of a word. For
example, tall and taller are both adjectives. The inflectional morpheme -er (comparative marker) simply
produces a different version of the adjective tall.
However, derivational morphemes often change the part of speech of a word. Thus, the verb read
becomes the noun reader when we add the derivational morpheme -er. It is simply that read is a verb,
but reader is a noun. However, some derivational morphemes do not change the grammatical category
of a word.
For example, such derivational prefixes as re- and un- in English generally do not change the category
of the word to which they are attached.
Thus, both happy and unhappy are adjectives, and both fill and refill are verbs, for example. The
derivational suffixes -hood and -dom, as in neighborhood and kingdom, are also the typical examples of
derivational morphemes that do not change the grammatical category of a word to which they
are attached.
Second, when a derivational suffix and an inflectional suffix are added to the same word, they always
appear in a certain relative order within the word. That is, inflectional suffixes follow derivational
suffixes. Thus, the derivational (-er) is added to read, then the inflectional (-s) is attached to produce
readers.
Similarly, in organize– organizes the inflectional -s comes after the derivational -ize. When an
inflectional suffix is added to a verb, as with organizes, then we cannot add any further derivational
suffixes. It is impossible to have a form like organizesable, with inflectional -s after derivational -able
because inflectional morphemes occur outside derivational morphemes and attach to the base or stem.
For these reasons, Akmajian et al. (2010, p. 46) state that derivational morphemes show the “inner”
layer of words, whilst inflectional suffixes mark the “outer” layer of words.
A third point worth emphasizing is that certain derivational morphemes serve to create new base forms
or new stems to which we can attach other derivational or inflectional affixes. For example, we use the
derivational -atic to create adjectives from nouns, as in words like systematic and problematic.
Then, we can further add -al to these two words to create systematical and problematical. Similarly, the
derivational suffix -ize is often added to create verbs from adjectives, as in modernize, and we can add
the inflectional suffix -s (modernizes) to such -ize verbs. To sum up, we can state that certain
derivational affixes produce new members for a given class of words, but inflectional affixes are always
added to available members of a given class of words.

Types of Morphemes

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Types of Morphemes: Free and Bound

Let us examine each of these severally:

Categories of Free Morphemes

These morphemes carry ‘content’ of messages we convey. In other words, lexical

Bound Morphemes are called Affixes in English. Affixes are also Bound

Types of Affixes in English

Omokomo – omo-ki-omo (bad child)

Isekuse – ise-ku-ise (lewd conduct)

Iwakiwa – iwa-ki-iwa (bad behaviour)

Ayeraye – aye-re-aye (everlasting)

Ilenle – ile-ni-ile (bare floor)

However, some scholars consider words like therm-o-dynamics, therm-o-meter,

INFLECTIONAL AND DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES

There are some differences between inflectional and derivational morphemes.

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