Morphology: Morpheme, Free Morpheme, and Bound Morpheme

Morphemes

    Morphology is the study of morpheme obviously. The definition of morphemes is the smallest meaningful unit that has grammatical function. For instance, the word tourist contains three morphemes. Those are one minimal unit of meaning tour, another minimal unit of meaning -ist (person who does something) and one minimal unit of grammatical function –s (indicating plural).

Free and Bound Morphemes

There is a broad distinction between two types of morphemes, free and bound. Free morphemes are the set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns and verbs that can stand by themselves as a single word such as open and tour. Then bound morphemes are morphemes that typically need to be attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist. This last set is identified as affixes. When free morphemes used with bound morphemes attached are technically known as stems. For example:
carelessness
care      -less        -ness
stem      suffix        suffix
free      bound    bound

However, there are a number of English words in which their stems are factually not free morphemes. In words such as receive, reduce, re- at the beginning of those words are identified as the bound morphemes but the elements –ceive, -duce are not separate words and free morphemes. So these types of form are described as ‘bound stems’ to distinguish them from ‘free stems’ such as dress and care.

Morphology; Types of the Morphemes

In morphology, there are two broad categories of morphemes: free morphem and bound morpheme

A. Free Morphemes

What we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which we think of as the word carrying the ‘content’ of message we convey. This free morpheme is called lexical morphemes and some examples are: boy, men, tiger, sad, long and yellow. We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily, so they are treated as an ‘open’ class of words. 

The other group of free morphemes is called functional morphemes.  The examples are: and, but, when, on, near, in, the, that. 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 ‘close’ class of words.

 B. Bound Morphemes

Affixes are often named as the bound morpheme. This group includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circum fixes. Prefixes are added to the beginning of another morpheme, suffixes are added to the end, infixes are inserted into other morphemes, and circum fixes are attached to another morpheme at the beginning and end. 

Following are examples of each of these:

Prefix: re- added to do produces redo
Suffix: -or added to edit produces editor
Infix: -um- added to fikas (strong) produces fumikas (to be strong) in Bontoc
Circum fix: ge- and -t to lieb (love) produces geliebt (loved) in German