• Morphemes are abstract units, which are realized in speech by discrete units known as morphs. ‘They are actual spoken, minimal carriers of meaning’. In other words the phonetic or orthographic strings or segments which realize morphemes are termed ‘morphs’. Most morphemes are realized by single morphs like bird, tree, green, sad, want, desire, etc.. These morphemes coincide with words as they can stand by themselves and function freely in a sentence. Words of this kind are called monomorphemic words. Some morphemes, however, are realized by more than one morph according to their position in a word.
3.3 Classifying Morphemes
• Morphemes vary in function. Accordingly, we can classify morphemes into several general categories: free versus bound, derivational versus inflectional, and lexical versus grammatical.
3. Content versus Grammatical Morphemes
• Content morphemes are lexical morphemes which are used as we see above to derive new words, so also known as derivational morphemes. • Grammatical morphemes, on the other hand, function primarily as grammatical markers, which are traditionally called functional words.
3.5 Morpheme and Word-formation
• We know that words can be analyzed into morphemes, which are the minimal meaningful units in the composition of words. In word-formation, however, morphemes are conventionally labeled root, stem, base and affix.
• 1. Affix Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify meaning or function. All affixes are bound morphemes because none of them can stand as words in their own right. According to the functions of affixes, we can divide them into inflectional affixes like –s, -ed and –ing, and derivational affixed like pre-, ex-, de- and –less. Derivational and inflectional affixes are identical with derivational and inflectional morphemes.
• The identification of inflection morphemes is more problematic. In most cases, an inflectional morpheme can be segmented from the stem of a word and naturally can be added to the stem.
3.2 Morphs and Allomorphs
• An allomorph refers to a number of a set of morphs, which represent one morpheme. Just as we class phones together as allophones of a single phoneme, so we class morphs together as allomorphs of a single morpheme.
• If the morphemes are always consistent in form and meaning, there should be no difficulty in identification. However, there is often mismatch between form and meaning. Some morphemes are identical in form but different in meaning. • Some morphemes are not meaningful in isolation but acquire meaning by virtue of their connection in words. There are other morphemes which occur in many words, but their meaning is difficult to define. Some forms are meaningful, but not morphemes.
Chapter three Morphological Structure of English Words
3.1 Morphemes
• Traditionally, words are usually treated as the basic and minimal units of a language to make sentences, which are combinations of words according to syntactic rules. Structurally, however, a word is not the smallest unit because many words can be separated into even smaller meaningful units. These minimal meaningful units are known as morphemes (morphe is the Greek word for “form”; -eme as in “phoneme” means ‘class of’).
Derivational (1) Changes meaning or part of speech of the stem. (2) Indicates semantic relations within the word. (3) Occurs with only some members of a class of morphemes. (4) Occurs before any inflectional suffixes added.
1. Free versus Bound Morphemes
• These morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can be used free grammatical units in sentences. They are identical with words, for example, man, earth, wind, car and anger. • Morphemes which cannot occur separate words are bound. They are so named because they are bound to other morphemes to form words or to perform a particular grammatical function. Bound morphemes are chiefly found in derived words.
3.4 Identifying Morphemes
• Since morphemes are the minimal distinct units, they should be identifiable by their forms, meaning and distribution. Generally speaking, lexical morphemes are easy to define: • Mono-morphemic: land, sky • Double-morphemic: chill + y, mis + take • Triple-morphemic: anti + govern + ment • Four-morphemic: un + friend + li + ness • Over-four-morphemic: inter + nation + al + iz(e) + ation