Different Types of Morphemes

What is Morpheme? Discuss Derivational, Inflectional and Cranberry Morphemes. Morpheme: A morpheme is the smallest unit of form that has meaning in a given language. A morpheme is a class of forms that have the same meaning or grammatical function, which are distributed non-contrastively either in mutually exclusively environments or in free variation. Examples: ‘un-’, comfort’, ‘-able’. Morphemes may be ‘free’ or ‘bound’. Free Morphemes: A morpheme is free if it is able to appear as a word by itself. These can be used independently or in combination with other morphemes. Free morphemes are also referred as ‘roots’. Bound Morphemes: It can be used only in combination with another morpheme, which itself may be free or bound. For example: The word ‘unlikely’ has three morphemes: ‘un-’, ‘like’, ‘-ly’; ‘like’ is a free morpheme; ‘un’ and ‘ly’ are bound morphemes. Some linguists describe morphemes as the ‘smallest recurrent elements of grammatical patterning’ and leave meaning out of the definition. For example: The word ‘receive’ has single morpheme. But in smaller units ‘re’ and ‘ceive’.
Morphemes (of English) Bound Affixes Root -fer -late Free Open-Class Nouns Verbs Adjectives Closed-Class Conjunctions Prepositions Determiners

Inflectional -er -s -ed

Derivational un-ness -ify

Derivational Morpheme Derivational Morphemes create new words. They derive new words from other words. For example; unhappy ← un + happy, happiness ← happy + ness, preview ← pre + view. Key Features: i) ii) iii) iv) Are not required by syntax. Are not very productive: dis-like Usually occurred before inflectional suffixes: work-er-s Can be either suffixes or prefixes.

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Change part of speech or meaning of a word: Part of Speech: us-able (V→A), trouble-some (N→A), judg-ment (V→N). Meaning: dis-comfort, ex-boyfriend. Both: use-less (V→A).

Inflectional Morphemes Inflectional Morphemes, on the other hand,