Morpheme - Free Morpheme / Bound Morpheme

Morpheme

In English, the new words can be formed by putting certain morphemes before the words, inserting certain morphemes in the middle of the words or adding certain morphemes after the words. The term of morpheme refers to the smallest, individual units of the semantic content or grammatical function of which the words are made up of. The morphemes cannot be composed into smaller units which are either meaningful by themselves or mark a grammatical function like number: singular or plural, and tenses: present and past (Katamba, 1993: 20)

The claim that words have structure might come as a surprise because speakers normally think of words as indivisible unit of meaning. This is probably due to the fact that many words are morphologically simple. For example: the, fierce, desk, eat etc cannot be segmented (i.e. divided up) into smaller that are meaningful by themselves. It is impossible to say what the quito part of mosquito or the –erce part of fierce means (Katamba, 1993: 19)

Morphemes are the smallest different in the shape of word that correlates with the smallest different in the word or sentences meaning or in grammatical structure (Katamba, 1993: 20)

Another theory comes from Bauer in his book entitled English Word Formation. He states that the basic units of analysis recognized in morphology are morpheme (Bauer, 1983: 13) 

Kinds of morpheme

Basically there are two morphemes which can form a new word i.e. bound morpheme and free morphemes.

1. Free morpheme

Roots which are capable of standing independently are called free morphemes. For example: man, book, tea, and sweet, bet, very. Single words like those mentioned before are the smallest free morphemes that are capable of occurring in isolation. The free morpheme mentioned before are examples of basic morphemes. There are nouns, verbs, adjective, preposition, and adverbs. Such morphemes carry most of the semantic content of utterances that is loosely defined to caver nations like referring to individuals ( e.g. john, mother), attributing properties ( e.g. the adjective kind, clever), describing action, process or state (e.g. the verb: hit, write, rest) expressing relations ( e.g. the preposition: in, on, under) and describing circumstances like manner (e.g. kindly) ( Katamba, 1993: 41). Another statement comes from Bauer, in his book entitled English Word-Formation (1983). He states that a morph which can occur in isolation (i.e. which can also be a word-form) is termed a free morpheme (Bauer, 1983: 17)

2. Bound morpheme

Many roots are incapable of occurring in isolation. They always occur in some other word-building element attached to them. Such roots are called bound morphemes. The examples of bound morphemes are: -mit (permit, remit, and admit), -cieve (perceive, receive, and conceive) (Katamba, 1993: 42)

Based on English Word-Formation by Bauer (1983), it is stated that a morph which can only occur in the word-in conjunction with at least on other morph is termed a bound morpheme (Bauer, 1983: 17) 

 Credits: Dana