Morphemes and Their Functions

Morphemes

• A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning or grammatical function
• Morphology studies morphemes
• Free morphemes can stand alone
  • Examples include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, and determiners
• Bound morphemes cannot stand alone
  • Examples include prefixes and suffixes
• When a free morpheme is used with a bound morpheme, it's called a stem.

Functional Morphemes

• Functional morphemes include articles, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns
• These are treated as a closed class of words
• They describe functions, not objects or actions

Allomorphs

• These are different forms of the same morpheme.
• They're used to indicate different grammatical functions
• Example forms:
  • Cats - s
  • Dogs - z
  • Horses - z

Bound Morphemes (Continued)

• Inflectional morphemes change the function of the word but do not change the core meaning.
  • Example: -ed and -s
• Derivational morphemes change the meaning of the word and can change the part of speech
  • Example: Add -less to care, creates careless.

Stems

• A stem is a word with a free morpheme
• When a bound morpheme is added to a stem, it creates a new word.

Example:

• re-ceive (re- is a prefix)
• re-peat (re- is a prefix)
  • In this case the prefixes change the basic meaning slightly.