Class 3

The Minimal Unit of Meaning: Morphemes

Source:
Dept. of Linguistics, Ohio State University. (1991). Language Files. (Fifth Edition).
Ohio State University Press. Pages 127-130.

What are Morphemes?

A continuous stream of speech can be broken up by the listener (or linguist) into smaller,
meaningful parts. A conversation, for example, can be divided into the sentences of the
conversation, which can be divided up further into the words which make up each of the
sentences. It is obvious to most people that a sentence has a meaning, and that each of
the words in it has meaning as well. Can we go further and divide words into smaller units
which still have meanings? Many people think not; their immediate intuition is that words
are the basic meaningful elements of language. This is, however, not the case. Many
words can be broken down into still smaller units. Think, for example, of words such as
unlucky, unhappy, and unsatisfied. The un- in each of these words has the same meaning,
loosely, that of 'not', but un is not a word by itself. Thus, we have identified units-smaller
than the word which have meanings. These are called morphemes.
Now consider the words look, looks, and looked. What about the s in looks and
the ed in looked? These segments can be separated from the meaningful unit look and
although they do not really have an identifiable meaning themselves, each does have a
particular function. The s is required for agreement with certain subjects (she looks, but
not *she look), and the ed signifies that the action of the verb look has already taken place.
Segments such as these are also considered morphemes. Thus, a morpheme is the
smallest linguistic unit which has a meaning or grammatical function.
Some words, of course, are not composed of other morphemes. Car, spider, and
race, for example, are words, but they are also morphemes since they cannot be broken
down into smaller meaningful parts. Morphemes which are also words are called free
morphemes since they can stand alone. Bound morphemes, on the other hand, never
exist as words themselves, but are always attached to some other morpheme. Some
examples of bound morphemes in English are un, ed, and s.
When we identify the number and types of morphemes a given word consists of,
we are looking at what is referred to as the structure of the word. Morphology is the study
of how words are structured and how they are put together from smaller parts.
Morphologists not only identify the different classes of morphemes but also study the
patterns which occur in the combination of morphemes in a given language. For example,
consider the words rewrite, retake. and relive. Notice that re is a bound morpheme which
attaches only to verbs, and, furthermore, attaches to the beginning of the verb, not the
end. Every speaker of English knows you can't say write-re or take-re (where re- is
connected to the end of the free morpheme), nor can you say rechoice or repretty (where
re- is connected to a morpheme which is not a verb). In other words, part of a speaker's
linguistic competence is knowing, in addition to the meaning of the morphemes of a
language, the ways in which the morphemes are allowed to combine with other
morphemes.
Morphemes can be classified as either bound or free, as we have seen. There are
three additional ways of characterizing morphemes. The first is to label bound
morphemes according to whether they attach to the beginning or end of a word. You are
most likely familiar with these terms. A prefix attaches to the beginning and a suffix
attaches to the end of a word. The general term for prefixes and suffixes is affix, so bound
morphemes are also referred to as affixes.
The second way of characterizing morphemes is to classify bound morphemes
according to their function in the complex words of which they are a part. When some
morphemes attach to words, they create, or derive, new words, either by changing the
meaning of the word or by changing its part of speech. For example, un- in unhappy
creates a new word with the opposite meaning of happy. Notice that both unhappy and
happy are adjectives. The suffix ness in quickness, however, changes the part of speech
of quick, an adjective, into a noun, quickness. Morphemes that change the meaning or
part of speech of a word they attach to are called derivational morphemes. Other
morphemes do not alter words in this way but only refine and give extra grammatical
information about the word's already existing meaning. For example, cat and cats are
both nouns which basically have the same meaning (i.e., they refer to the same sort of
thing), but cats, with the plural morpheme -s, contains only the additional information
that there are more than one of these things referred to. The morphemes which serve a
purely grammatical function, never creating a new word but only a different form of the
same word, are called inflectional morphemes.
In every word we find that there is at least one free morpheme. In a
morphologically complex word, i.e., one composed of a free morpheme and any number
of bound affixes, the free morpheme is referred to as the stem, root, or base. However, if
there is more than one affix in a word, we cannot say that all of the affixes attach to the
stem. Consider the word happenings, for example. When -ing is added to happen, we
note that a new word is derived. The plural morpheme -s is added onto the word
happening, not the suffix -ing.
In English the derivational morphemes are either prefixes or suffixes, but, by
chance, the inflectional morphemes are all suffixes. Of course, this is not the same in
other languages. There are only eight inflectional morphemes in English. They are listed
below along with an example of the type of stem each can attach to.
The 8 Inflectional Suffixes of English

Stem Suffix Function Example

wait -s 3rd per. sg. present She waits there at noon.

wait -ed past tense She waited there yesterday.
wait -ing progressive She is waiting there now.
eat -en past participle Jack has eaten the Oreos.
chair -s plural The chairs are in the room.
chair -’s possessive The chair's leg is broken.
fast -er comparative Jill runs faster than Joe.
fast -est superlative Tim runs fastest of all.

The difference between inflectional and derivational morphemes is sometimes

difficult to see at first. Some characteristics of each are listed below to help make the
distinction clearer.

Derivational Morphemes:

1. Change the part of speech or the meaning of a word e.g., -ment added to a verb forms
a noun (judg-ment) re-activate means 'activate again'.

2. Syntax does not require the presence of derivational morphemes. They typically
indicate semantic relations within a word, but no syntactic relations outside the word
(compare this with #2 below) e.g., un-kind relates -un 'not' to kind, but has no particular
syntactic connections outside the word.

3. Are usually not very productive. Derivational morphemes generally are selective about
what they'll combine with e.g., the suffix -hood occurs with just a few nouns such as
brother, neighbor, and knight, but not with most others, e.g., friend, daughter, or candle.

4. Typically occur before inflectional suffixes, e.g., govern-ment-s: -ment, a derivational

suffix, precedes -s, an inflectional suffix.

5. May be prefixes or suffixes (in English), e.g., pre-arrange, arrange-ment.

Inflectional Morphemes:

1. Do not change the meaning or part of speech, e.g., big, bigg-er, biggest are all
adjectives.
2. Are required by the syntax. They typically indicate syntactic or semantic relations
between different words in a sentence, e.g., Nim love-s bananas: -s marks the 3rd person
singular present form of the verb, relating it to the 3rd singular subject Nim.

3. Are very productive. They typically occur with all members of some large class of
morphemes, e.g., the plural morpheme /-s/ occurs with almost all nouns.

4. Occur at the margin of a word, after any derivational morphemes, e.g., ration-al-iz-
ation-s: -s is inflectional, and appears at the very end of the word

5. Are suffixes only (in English).

There is one final distinction between types of morphemes which is useful to make.
Some morphemes have semantic content. That is, they either have some kind of
independent, identifiable meaning or indicate a change in meaning when added to word.
Others serve only to provide information about grammatical function by relating certain
words in a sentence to each other (see 2 under inflectional morphemes, above). The
former are called content (or lexical) morphemes, and the latter are called function
morphemes. This might appear at first to be the same as the inflectional and derivational
distinction. They do overlap, but not completely. All derivational morphemes are content
morphemes, and all inflectional morphemes are function morphemes, as you might have
surmised. However, some words can be merely function morphemes. Examples in
English of such free morphemes which are also function morphemes are prepositions,
articles, pronouns, and conjunctions.
One of the more interesting things revealed by transcribing morphemes
phonetically is the interaction of phonological and morphological processes. For
example, some morphemes have more than one phonetic representation depending on
which sounds precede or follow them, but since each of the pronunciations serves the
same function or has the same meaning, it is considered to be the same morpheme. In
other words, the same morpheme can be pronounced differently depending upon the
sounds which follow or precede it. Of course, these different pronunciations will be
patterned. For example, the phonetic representation of the plural morpheme is either [s]
as in cats, [z] as in dogs, or [əz] as in churches. Each of these three pronunciations is said
to be an allomorph of the same morpheme because [s], [z], and [əz] all have the same
function (making some word plural) and because they are similar phonetically.
We now call your attention to a pitfall of identifying morphemes. First, don't
confuse morphemes with syllables. A few examples will show that the number of
morphemes and syllables in a word are independent of each other. Consider the word
coats. It is a one-syllable word composed of two morphemes. Coat happens to be one
morpheme and consists of a single syllable, but -s is not even a syllable, although it is a
morpheme.
 Finally, we include below a summary list of criteria which might help you to identify
the different types of morphemes.

When analyzing a morpheme:

1. Can it stand alone as a word?

YES → it's a free morpheme (e.g., bubble, orange)

NO → it's a bound morpheme (e.g., -er in beater, -s in oranges)

2. Does it have the principal meaning of the word it's in?

YES → it's the stem (e.g., happy in unhappiness)

NO → it's an affix (e.g., -or in contributor or, pre- in preview)

3. Does it create a new word by changing the meaning and/or part of speech?

YES → it's a derivational affix (e.g., re- in rewind, -ist in artist)

NO → it's an inflectional affix (e.g., -est in smartest)

4. Does it have a meaning, or cause a change in meaning when added to a word?

YES → it's a content morpheme (e.g., -un in untrue)

NO → it's a function morpheme (e.g., the, to, or, -s in books)