Kinds of Morphemes

Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change either the semantic meaning
or part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the
bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to
a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme, for it inverts
the meaning of the word formed by the root kind.

Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense or a noun's number without affecting the
word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to
the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. In English, there are eight
inflections.

Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear with
other lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).

Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and
sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only accompanied by
other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes,
particularly prefixes and suffixes, examples of suffixes are: tion, ation, ible, ing, etc. Bound
morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes.

Phonemes

one of the set of speech sounds in any given language that serve to distinguish one word from another. A
phoneme may consist of several phonetically distinct articulations, which are regarded as identical by nati
ve speakers, since onearticulation may be substituted for another without any change of meaning. Thus /
p/ and /b/ are separate phonemes in Englishbecause they distinguish such words as pet and bet, wherea
s the light and dark /l/ sounds in little are not separate phonemes sincethey may be transposed without ch
anging meaning

IPA

The International Phonetic Alphabet (unofficiallythough commonlyabbreviated IPA) is

an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by
the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of oral
language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers,
linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators,
and translators.
The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of oral
language: phones, phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent
additional qualities of speech, such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palate,
an extended set of symbols called the Extensions to the IPA may be used.

Difference between linguistics and mental

Linguistics is the science of human language. Although the modern term
'linguistics' derives from the Latin word for tongue, lingua, the true organ of
language is the human mind. We even call languages "tongues," but language is
first and foremost a mental process that only secondarily involves the tongue, lips,
and vocal cords--the so-called organs of speech. It is often repeated that our
complex language separates us from all other species--that language is the
hallmark of our unique human intellect.

The concept of mental grammar was popularized by American linguist Noam in

his groundbreaking work Syntactic Structures (1957). As Binder and Smith have
observed, "This focus on grammar as a mental entity allowed enormous progress
to be made in characterizing the structure of languages