Morpheme A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.

Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural, for example. In the sentence The police reopened the investigation, the word reopened consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit of meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is re(meaning again) and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed (indicating past tense). The word tourists also contains three morphemes. There is one minimal unit of meaning tour, another minimal unit of meaning -ist (marking person who does something), and a minimal unit of grammatical function -s (indicating plural). Free and bound morphemes Free morphemes - morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for example, open and tour - separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. Bound morphemes - cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplied as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. - all afxes (prexes and sufxes) in English are bound morphemes. When free morphemes are used with bound morphemes attached, the basic word forms are technically known as stems. For example: 1 unprex (bound) undressed dress stem (free) -ed sufx (bound) care stem (free) carelessness -less sufx (bound) -ness sufx (bound)

There are a number of English words in which the element treated as the stem is not, in fact, a free morpheme. In words such as receive, reduce and repeat, we can identify the bound morpheme re- at the beginning, but the elements -ceive, -duce and -peat are not separate word forms and hence cannot be free morphemes. These types of forms are sometimes described as bound stems to keep them distinct from free stems such as dress and care. Lexical and functional morphemes Free morphemes fall into two categories. The rst category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that we think of as the words that carry the content of the messages we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes and some examples are: girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look, follow, break. We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily, so they are treated as an open class of words. Other types of free morphemes are called functional morphemes. Examples are and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a closed class of words.

Categories and subcategories of words and morphemes The different types of words are variously called parts of speech, word classes, or lexical categories. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language gives this list of 8 for English: noun pronoun verb adjective Relationship between words and morphemes What is the relationship between words and morphemes? It's a hierarchical one: a word is made up of one or more morphemes. Most commonly, these morphemes are strung together, or concatenated, in a line. However, it is not uncommon to find non-concatenative morphemes in other languages than English. Word structure Simple word: consists of only one morpheme, e.g.: boy, man, radio, book, paper, magnet, house, compute Complex word: contains more than one morpheme (i.e. 2 morphemes), e.g.: computer, boys, radio-recorder, bookshelf, magnetize Note: a complex word may show both inflection and derivation! 2 Derivational and inectional morphemes Derivational morphemes - We use these bound morphemes to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For example, the addition of the derivational morpheme -ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness. The noun care can become the adjectives careful or careless by the addition of the derivational morphemes -ful or -less. derivational morphemes are e.g. suffixes: -ish in foolish, -ly in quickly, -ment in payment. prexes: re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-, un-, etc. Inectional morphemes - These are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Inectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form. English has only eight inectional morphemes (or inections), illustrated in the following sentences. Jims two sisters are really different. One likes to have fun and is always laughing. The other liked to read as a child and has always taken things seriously. One is the loudest person in the house and the other is quieter than a mouse. From these examples, we can see that two of the inections, -s (possessive) and -s (plural), are attached to nouns. There are four inections attached to verbs, -s (3rd person singular), -ing (present participle), -ed (past tense) and -en (past participle). There are two inections attached adverb conjunction preposition interjection

to adjectives: -est (superlative) and -er (comparative). In English, all the inectional morphemes are sufxes. Noun + Verb + Adjective + -s, -s -s, -ing, -ed, -en -est, -er

There is some variation in the form of these inectional morphemes. For example, the possessive sometimes appears as -s (those boysbags) and the past participle as -ed (they have nished). An inectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. For example, both old and older are adjectives. However, a derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word. The verb teach becomes the noun teacher if we add the derivational morpheme er. So, the sufx -er in modern English can be an inectional morpheme as part of an adjective and also a distinct derivational morpheme as part of a noun. Just because they look the same (-er) doesnt mean they do the same kind of work. Whenever there is a derivational sufx and an inectional sufx attached to the same word, they always appear in that order. First the derivational (-er) is attached to teach, then the inectional (-s) is added to produce teachers. e.g. In the sentence The childs wildness shocked the teachers, we can identify eleven morphemes. 3 The functional shock lexical child lexical -ed inectional -s inectional the functional wild lexical teach lexical -ness derivational -er derivational -s inectional

A useful way to remember all these different types of morphemes is in the following chart. lexical (child, teach) free functional (and, the) morphemes derivational (re-, -ness) bound inflectional (-'s, -ed ) Problems in morphological description So far, we have only considered examples of English words in which the different morphemes are easily identiable as separate elements. The inectional morpheme -s is added to car and we get the plural cars. What is the inectional morpheme that makes sheep the plural of sheep, or men the plural of man? And if -al is the derivational sufx added to the stem institution to give us institutional, then can we take -al off the word legal to get the stem leg? Unfortunately, the answer is No. Reason - historical inuences and the effect of borrowed elements.

Morphs and allomorphs Just as we treated phones as the actual phonetic realization of phonemes, we can propose morphs as the actual forms used to realize morphemes. For example, the form cars consists of two morphs, car + -s, realizing a lexical morpheme and an inectional morpheme (plural). The form buses also consists of two morphs (bus + -es), realizing a lexical morpheme and an inectional morpheme (plural). So there are at least two morphs (-s and -es) used to realize the inectional morpheme plural. Just as we noted that there were allophones of a particular phoneme, we can recognize the existence of allomorphs of a particular morpheme. That is, when we nd a group of different morphs, all versions of one morpheme, we can use the prex allo- (= one of a closely related set) and describe them as allomorphs of that morpheme. Take the morpheme plural. Note that it can be attached to a number of lexical morphemes to produce structures like cat + plural, bus + pluralsheep + plural and man + plural. In each of these examples, the actual forms of the morphs that result from the morpheme plural are different. Yet they are all allomorphs of the one morpheme. So, in addition to -s and -es, another allomorph of plural in English seems to be a zero-morph because the plural form of sheep is actually sheep + . When we look at man + plural, we have a vowel change in the word ( ) as the morph that produces the so-called irregular plural form men. Or: past tense- common pattern in walk + past tense that produces walked vs. special pattern that takes go + past tense and produces the irregular past form went. Allomorphs: Nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar. For example, the English plural morpheme can appear as [s] as in cats, [z] as in dogs, or ['Iz] as in churches. Each of these three pronunciations is said to be an allomorph of the same morpheme. An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments. Prexes and sufxes Some afxes have to be added to the beginning of the word (e.g. un-). These are called prexes. Other afxes have to be added to the end of the word (e.g. -ish) and are called sufxes. All English words formed by this derivational process have either prexes or sufxes, or both. Thus, mislead has a prex, disrespectful has both a prex and a sufx, and foolishness has two sufxes. Inxes There is a third type of afx, not normally used in English, but found in some other languages. This is called an inx and, as the term suggests, it is an afx that is incorporated inside another word. It is occasionally used by emotionally aroused English speakers: Hallebloodylujah!, Absogoddamlutely! and Unfuckinbelievable!.In the lm Wish You Were Here, the main character expresses her aggravation (at another character who keeps trying to contact her) by screaming Tell him Ive gone to Singabloodypore! However, a much better set of examples can be provided from Kamhmu, a language spoken in South-East Asia.
(to drill) (to chisel) (to eat with a spoon) (to tie) Verb see toh hiip hoom Noun srnee (a drill) trnoh (a chisel) hrniip (a spoon) hrnoom (a thing with which to tie)

From these examples, we can see that there is a regular pattern whereby the inx -rn- is added to verbs to form corresponding nouns. Constituent Structure of Words The constituent morphemes of a word can be organized into a branching or hierarchical structure, sometimes called a tree structure. Consider the word unusable. It contains three morphemes: 1. prefix "un-" 2. verb stem "use" 3. suffix "-able" What is the structure? Is it first "use" + "-able" to make "usable", then combined with "un-" to make "unusable"? or is it first "un-" + "use" to make "unuse", then combined with "-able" to make "unusable"? Since "unuse" doesn't exist in English, while "usable" does, we prefer the first structure, which corresponds to the tree shown below.

This analysis is supported by the general behaviour of these affixes. There is a prefix "un-" that attaches to adjectives to make adjectives with a negative meaning ("unhurt", "untrue", "unhandy", etc.). And there is a suffix "-able" that attaches to verbs and forms adjectives ("believable", "fixable", "readable"). This gives us the analysis pictured above. There is no way to combine a prefix "un-" directly with the verb "use", so the other logically-possible structure won't work. Now let's consider the word "unlockable". This also consists of three morphemes: 1. prefix "un-" 2. verb stem "lock" 3. suffix "-able" This time, though, a little thought shows us that there are two different meanings for this word: one corresponding to the left-hand figure, meaning "not lockable," and a second one corresponding to the right-hand figure, meaning "able to be unlocked."

In fact, un- can indeed attach to (some) verbs: untie, unbutton, uncover, unwrap... Larry Horn (1988) points out that the verbs that permit prefixation with un-are those that effect a change in state in some object, the form with un- denoting the undoing (!) of that change. This lets us account for the two senses of "unlockable". We can combine the suffix -able with the verb lock to form an adjective lockable, and then combine the prefix un- with lockable to make a new adjective unlockable, meaning "not able to be locked". Or we can combine the prefix un- with the verb lock to form a new verb unlock, and then combine the suffix -able with unlock to form an adjective unlockable, meaning "able to be unlocked". By making explicit the different possible hierarchies for a single word, we can better understand why its meaning might be ambiguous.