Hello guys and welcome to an online class on English. We will be talking about the English morphemes.
Now, morphemes are the smallest unit of grammar that can not be further broken down and are meaningful. That is ; A morpheme can be a word that cannot be divided without having the same meaning with the original word. For example ‘’BANANA’’ is a morpheme. It can not be divided further. We can not say BANA NA. Bana has no meaning relating to the actual word banana and it doesn’t even have a meaning on it’s own even.
NOTE : The number of syllables in a word does not determine if it is a morpheme or not or if it can still be divisible
TYPES OF MORPHEMES
Free Morphemes : These are Morphemes that can stand alone and have meaning. Although it is not accepted to say it like this but These are actually words but mind you they are not called words in grammar… they are called the smallest units.Our previous example BANANA is a free morpheme. It does not need the addition of another morpheme before it has it’s meaning.
Bound Morphemes : These are morphemes that need to be attached to other morphemes (free morphemes) before they can be meaningful.. These types of morphemes need to be added to free morphemes to make sense.
TYPES OF MORPHEMES UNDER BOUND MORPHEMES
Inflectional morphemes : These are morphemes that do not change the class of a free morpheme when it is added to it., changing the mood, numbers and tense but it never changes it the class of the word…. doesn’t change if from a verb to a noun or vice-versa.
For example CRY + ES = CRIES
BOY+ S = BOYS
Derivational morphemes : These are morphemes that change the class of a free morpheme from either verb to noun or noun to verb or any other class of word.
For example : TEACH + ER = TEACHER
LAUNCH + ER = LAUNCHER
NOTE : When both inflective and derivational morphemes are in a word, the inflective morpheme comes last.
For example LECTURERS ----- LECTURE + ER + S
Lecture is already a verb…, the addition of a bound derivational morpheme ER changes it to a noun…. then the addition of an inflective morpheme changes the number of lecturers we have.
Post created and written by @stephenevets, edited and posted by @camzy
Image used was gotten from PIXABAY
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