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Morphology: Morphemes Are Defined As The Smallest Meaning-Bearing Units in Language. We Can Recognize

Morphology is the study of words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. There are two types of morphemes: free morphemes that can stand alone as words, and bound morphemes that are attached to other forms. Free morphemes include lexical categories like nouns and verbs, and functional categories like conjunctions. Bound morphemes include derivational morphemes that create new words and inflectional morphemes that indicate grammatical functions like number, tense, and case.

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286 views1 page

Morphology: Morphemes Are Defined As The Smallest Meaning-Bearing Units in Language. We Can Recognize

Morphology is the study of words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. There are two types of morphemes: free morphemes that can stand alone as words, and bound morphemes that are attached to other forms. Free morphemes include lexical categories like nouns and verbs, and functional categories like conjunctions. Bound morphemes include derivational morphemes that create new words and inflectional morphemes that indicate grammatical functions like number, tense, and case.

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Morphology

Morphology comes from a Greek word meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form’. Morphology is the study of
words, their internal structure and their combination or formation to form new or larger units.

Morphemes are defined as the smallest meaning-bearing units in language. We can recognize
that English word forms such as talks, talker, talked and talking must consist of one element talk,
and a number of other elements such as -s, -er, -ed and -ing. All these elements are described as
morphemes. Types of morphemes:

 Free morphemes can stand by themselves as single words. They are dentified as the set
of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. When they
are used with bound morphemes attached, the basic word forms are technically known
as stems. Categories of free morphemes:
1. Lexical morphemes consist of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that we think of
as the words that carry the “content” of the messages we convey.
2. Functional morphemes consist largely of the functional words in the language such
as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.
 Bound morpheme cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another
form. Bound morpheme also known as affixes. Categories of bound morphemes:
1. Derivational morphemes are used to make new words or to make words of a
different grammatical category from the stem.
2. Inflectional morphemes are not used to produce new words in the language, but
rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional
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.

Summarized from:

Introduction to English Language and Linguistics – Reader by Susan Dostert

The Study of Language by George Yule

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