The term 'morpheme' is exploited to refer to the smallest meaningful, observable, syntactic or grammatical unit in a language that cannot be divided without altering or destroying its meaning. For example, sing' is a morpheme; but if we remove 'g' or 's', it changes to 'sin' or '-ing', which have quite different meanings; and if we remove ‘si’ or the like, sing' loses its meaning. In writing, individual morphemes are usually represented by their graphic form, or spelling, for example, -es, -er, un-, re -; or by their graphic form between bracers { }, for example, {-es}, {-er}, {un-}, {re-}.
Bloomfield (1933) presents a
precise definition of the morpheme ‘as a linguistic form that bears no partial
phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form’. According to this definition,
'speaking,' for example, cannot be a morpheme since part of it resembles the
first part of 'speaks', and part of it resembles the second part of going'. But
if we divide 'speaking' into two- 'speak'/ spi:k/ and '-ing' / in/-, these
forms have no partial resemblance to any other form, and, hence, are morphemes.
Bloomfield primarily divided
morpheme in two sections. These are : free morphemes and bound morphemes.
Classification of Morpheme:
Figure:
Classification of Morpheme
Free morphemes: morphemes
that can functions independently are called free or independent morphemes, for
example, man, boy, girl, cow, mango, curly, beauty, is, an, but, clever,
animal, city, and the like. Free morphemes are also classified into two
sub-classes: lexical content or referential morphemes and grammatical or
functional morphemes.
Lexical Morphemes: The
lexical morphemes are very large in number and independently meaningful. They
include nouns. (For example, man, cat, pen, rice, country, land, etc.), Main
verbs (e.g., do, go, come, eat, write, jump, etc.), adjectives (e.g., large,
long, short, dull, wide, beautiful, etc.), and adverbs (e.g., quickly, slowly,
happily, sadly, etc.). Lexical morphemes form the open class of words ( content
words) in a language,
Grammatical
morphemes:
Grammatical morphemes
are very limited in number and can also be used independently. They have little
or no meaning on their own but demonstrate grammatical relationships [s in and
between sentences. They usually include auxiliary verbs(for example, am, is,
are, can, may, etc.), determiners( for example, a, an, the, much, many, little,
each, etc.
), prepositions( e.g. in, on, up, into, over, through, below, etc.),
conjunction(e.g. And, but, yet, or) and so on.
Bound Morpheme
Some morphemes cannot function alone and are added to root words. This type of morpheme is called a bound or dependent morpheme. For example, -less, -ness, pre-, -ment, un-, im-, and so forth. Bound morphemes are of two types: bound roots and affixes.
Bound roots include those bound
morphemes which have lexical meaning when they are attached to other bound
morphemes to form content words, for example, -ceive in receive,
conceive; -tain in retain, contain; -plac in
implacable, placate; cran- in cranberry; etc. it is noteworthy
that bound roots can be prefixed or suffixed to other affixes.
Affixes are bound morphemes which are usually marginally attached to words, and which change the meaning or function of those words, for example: -ment in development, en- in enlarge; ‘s in John’s; -s in claps, -ing in studying, etc. Affixes can be classified in two different ways: a) according to their position in the word; and b) according to their function in a phrase or sentence.
Figure: Subdivision of Bound Morphemes
According to their position in the word (or side of the word they are attached t
o), affixes are classified into prefixes, infixes, and suffixes.Prefixes are bound
morphemes added to the beginning word,
for example, un- in unnoticed, a- in amoral, sub- in subway, etc.
Infixes are bound
morphemes inserted within the words. There are no infixes in the English
language, but in languages such as Tagalog and Bontoc in the Philippines.
Suffixes are bound
morphemes attached to the end pf the word, for example, -able in noticeable,
-less in careless, -s in seeks, -en in shorten, etc.
Derivational affixes are the
morphemes that create new words, usually by either changing the meaning and/or
the word category or both. In English, derivational morphemes can be either
prefixes or suffixes, for example, un-+happy (adjective) =unhappy (adjective);
re-+ classify (verb) = reclassify (verb); by-+product (noun) = by-product
(noun). The derivational morphemes can thus be divided into two classes-
class-maintaining morphemes and class-changing morphemes. The clas -maintaining
derivational morphemes stand for those suffixes that generate a derived form of
the same class, such as -hood in boyhood and -ship in scholarship. On the
contrary, the clas changing derivational morphemes refer to those morphemes that
produce a derived form of another class, such as -er in teacher. ---ish in
childish, -al in national, etc. thus, it is clear that derivational morphemes
are used to change the grammatical categories of words.
Inflectional affixes or
morphemes are morphemes that serve a pure grammatical function, that is,
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 word class. For instance, the different forms of verb ‘speak’
are all considered to be verbs too, namely, speak, spoken, and speaking.
In a like manner, the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective ‘strong’
are also adjectives, namely, stronger, strongest. In English, there are
only eight inflections - third person singular marker of present tense, as in speaks,
teaches: regular plural as in books, oranges, possessive marker 's/s'
as in John's; regular past tense marker, as in helped, repeated;
past participle marker -en, as in spoken, eaten; present
participle marker -ing, as in eating, studying; comparative
marker -er, as in faster, happier and superlative marker -est,
as in fastest, happiest.
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