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The Morphemes

Morphemes are divided into two types: free morphemes and bound morphemes. Free morphemes can stand alone as independent lexical items like "dog" or functional words like "and". Bound morphemes cannot stand alone and must be attached to other morphemes, such as the suffixes "-ed" or "-ing" or prefixes like "re-". Affixes are a type of bound morpheme that can be added to words to change their meaning or function. Affixes are further divided into inflectional morphemes, which change attributes like tense without changing the word's class, and derivational morphemes, which change the word's class or meaning.

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24 views

The Morphemes

Morphemes are divided into two types: free morphemes and bound morphemes. Free morphemes can stand alone as independent lexical items like "dog" or functional words like "and". Bound morphemes cannot stand alone and must be attached to other morphemes, such as the suffixes "-ed" or "-ing" or prefixes like "re-". Affixes are a type of bound morpheme that can be added to words to change their meaning or function. Affixes are further divided into inflectional morphemes, which change attributes like tense without changing the word's class, and derivational morphemes, which change the word's class or meaning.

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Orsy Flores
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The morphemes are of two types.

They are:
Free Morphemes
Bound Morphemes
Free morpheme: A morpheme that has a particular meaning and can be formed
independently is called a free morpheme. For example, free, get, human, song, love, happy,
sad, may, much, but, or, some, above, when, etc.
Free morphemes are divided into two categories: Lexical morphemes and functional
morphemes.
The lexical morphemes are those morphemes that are large in number and independently
meaningful. The lexical morphemes include nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes—for example, dog, good, honest, boy,
girl, woman, excellent, etc.
Functional morphemes are set of functional words like conjunctions, prepositions,
articles, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, modals and quantifiers. Some examples of functional
morphemes are and, near, when, on, because, but, it, in, that, the, and above.

Bound Morphemes cannot self stand, and must be attached to other morphemes.
Opened: (Open + ed) = root + suffix
Reopen: (Re + open) = Prefix + root
Root morpheme: the morpheme base upon which other morphemes are attached to create
complex words.
Affixes are those bound morphemes that naturally attached different types of words and are
used to change the meaning or function of those words.
The set of affixes that make up the category of bound morphemes can also be divided into
two types. Derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes.
Inflectional morphemes impact the base words to signal a change in quantity, person,
gender, or tense while leaving the base word’s class unchanged.  
Derivational morphemes contemplate on lexical because they impact the base word as
stated to its grammatical and lexical class, resulting in a drastic change to the base. 

Prefixes: Bound morphemes that link to the beginning of a root.


Suffixes: Bound morphemes that link to the end of a root.

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