Bound or Free?
Free morphemes are able to constitute a word of their own. When combined with bound morphemes the free morphemes are called ‘stems’. In some words identified stems cannot stand alone and are called ‘bound stems’ (receive, deceive, perceive).
Bound morphemes must be attached to either a free morpheme or another bound morpheme. Prefixes (re-, un-, dis-, pre-) and suffixes (-ness, -less, -ly) are types of bound morphemes. Clitics, such as the possessive ‘s’ is also a bound morpheme.
Lexical or Functional?
Lexical morphemes are a set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that carry the ‘content’ of the message we convey. This is an ‘open’ class of morphemes because we can add new words to the language easily (girl, tiger, sincere, play, e-mail, blog).
Functional morphemes – consist of functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and pronouns. This is a ‘closed’ class of morphemes because we almost never add new functional words to the language (and, he, the, above).
Derivational or Inflectional?
Derivational morphemes – make new words of a different grammatical category from a stem (noun care can be changed to adjectives careful, careless; and the latter can be changed to an adverb carelessly).
Inflectional morphemes – indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. There are eight inflectional morphemes in English. They are all suffixes. Two inflectional morphemes can be attached to nouns, -‘s (possessive case), -(e)s (plural). Four inflections can be attached to verbs, -(e)d (past tense), -ing (present participle), -en (past participle), -s (3rd person singular). Two inflections can be attached to adjectives, -er (comparative), -est (superlative).
In the sentence The child’s wildness shocked the teachers, we can identify eleven morphemes.
The child -‘s wild -ness
functional lexical inflectional lexical derivational
shock -ed the teach -er -s
lexical inflectional functional lexical derivational inflectional
