FREE MORPHEME AND BOUND MORPHEME

Free Morpheme and Bound Morpheme

Free Morpheme

Definition: A morpheme that can stand alone and cannot be divided into smaller word units. A good test McIntyre suggests is if the word can stand alone as the answer to a question, it’s a free morpheme.

	Breakdown of a Morpheme
	Free Morpheme Free + Bound Morpheme (allomorph) ant black car fish happy hunt think war dis-pleas-ure electr-ic nerv-ous tree-s walk-ed who-se

• Lexical morphemes

Lexical morphemes are words such as ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which carry the ‘content’ of the message we convey.

Examples:

car, red, high, chase, copy, swallow

• Functional morphemes

Functional morphemes are functional words such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.

Examples:

and, but, when, because, of, the, between.

Bound Morpheme

Definition: A morpheme that appears only as part of a larger word or that occurs in only one phrase. For a bound morpheme to make sense, you have to add another morpheme. Prefixes and suffixes are bound root morphemes.

• Derivational morphemes

Derivational morphemes are morphemes that change the meaning or word class of a word.

Examples:

Negative: deactiviate, disconnect, inability, impossible, misunderstanding, unclassified

Size /degree: enlarge, underachieving, overestimated

Space /time: prerequisite, postgraduate, reuse

Change to adjective: manageable, faithful, anonymous

Change to noun: enjoyment, eagerness

Change to verb: privatise

Change to adverb: absolutely

• Inflectional morphemes

Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that indicate grammatical changes. All inflectional morphemes are suffixes.

Examples:

Attached to verb: reads, reading, ended, taken

Attached to noun: Peter‘s, dogs 

Attached to adjective: taller, tallest

Referensi : http://kddidit.com/2015/07/04/grammar-morpheme/