{"id":2924,"date":"2018-10-16T23:00:16","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T05:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=2924"},"modified":"2024-03-20T08:44:36","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T13:44:36","slug":"making-sense-of-morphemes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/definitions\/making-sense-of-morphemes\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Sense of Morphemes"},"content":{"rendered":"

A GrammarBook.com reader recently wrote to us with a question about the use of morphemes in American English. We thought this was a good opportunity to review the subject in further understanding the structure and parts of our language.<\/p>\n

Language, like matter, can be broken down from its largest to its smallest components. The five grammatical units of English are sentence, clause, phrase, word, and, the least of them, the morpheme. (An alphabet letter would not be considered a grammatical unit,\u00a0nor would phonemes and syllables, which pertain to sounds<\/em> in language.)<\/p>\n

Dictionary.com defines a morpheme as \u201cany of the minimal grammatical units of language, each constituting a word or meaningful part of a word, that cannot be divided into smaller independent grammatical parts, such as \u2018the,\u2019 \u2018write,\u2019 or the \u2018-ed\u2019 of \u2018waited.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Every word in American English includes at least one morpheme. A morpheme differs from a word mainly in that it may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is always independent.<\/p>\n

When a morpheme can stand alone with its own meaning, it is a root, <\/em>or the base to which other morphemes can be added (e.g., dog, cat, house<\/em>). When a morpheme depends on another morpheme to complete its idea, it is an affix <\/em>(e.g., -est<\/em> needs fast<\/em> to function for the superlative fastest<\/em>; il-<\/em> needs logical <\/em>to help us state something is \u201cnot\u201d logical).<\/em><\/p>\n

Thus, morphemes are either free <\/em>(root) or bound <\/em>(affix).<\/em> Because it has its own meaning, a free morpheme<\/em> can serve as a word that does not always require other morphemes. Because a bound morpheme <\/em>offers only a partial meaning, it cannot service as word; it will always have to join with a free morpheme to form one. Both prefixes and suffixes are bound morphemes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Consider the morphemes in the following words; the bound morphemes <\/em>are italicized and separated from the free morphemes <\/em>by hyphens:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
multi-<\/em>million-aire<\/em><\/td>\nun-<\/em>certain-ty<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
trans-<\/em>continent-al<\/em><\/td>\ndis-<\/em>agree-ment<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
tele-<\/em>graph-y<\/em><\/td>\npeace-ful-ness<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Understanding morphemes helps us better recognize how words are formed and frees us to work with linguistic parts more aptly in achieving written precision.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pop Quiz<\/h2>\n

In the following words, identify if the italicized morpheme is free or bound.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0un<\/em>common
\na) free morpheme
\nb) bound morpheme<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0honor<\/em>ary
\na) free morpheme
\nb) bound morpheme<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0provoc<\/em>ative
\na) free morpheme
\nb) bound morpheme<\/p>\n

4) inflection<\/em>al
\na) free morpheme
\nb) bound morpheme<\/p>\n

5)\u00a0capital<\/em>ization
\na) free morpheme
\nb) bound morpheme<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Pop Quiz Answers<\/h3>\n

1.\u00a0un<\/em>common
\na) free morpheme
\nb) bound morpheme<\/strong><\/p>\n

2.\u00a0honor<\/em>ary
\na) free morpheme<\/strong>
\nb) bound morpheme<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0provoc<\/em>ative
\na) free morpheme (the root is provoke)<\/strong>
\nb) bound morpheme<\/p>\n

4) inflection<\/em>al
\na) free morpheme
\nb) bound morpheme<\/strong><\/p>\n

5)\u00a0capital<\/em>ization
\na) free morpheme<\/strong>
\nb) bound morpheme<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A GrammarBook.com reader recently wrote to us with a question about the use of morphemes in American English. We thought this was a good opportunity to review the subject in further understanding the structure and parts of our language. Language, like matter, can be broken down from its largest to its smallest components. The five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,48,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-definitions","category-prefixes-and-suffixes","category-vocabulary"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2924"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6882,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2924\/revisions\/6882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}