2, MORPHOLOGY

It is the study of word formation and structure. It studies how words are
put together from their smaller parts and the rules governing this
process. The elements that are combining to form words are called
morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning you can have
in a language. The word “cats”, for example, contains the morphemes
“cat” and the plural. “-s”
Free morphemes:
Morphemes which can stand by themselves as single words, without
any necessary morphemes attached to them. They fall into two
categories. When they are used with bound morphemes, the basic word
form is called stem.
 Lexical morphemes They carry the content of the messages we
convey, such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. They are open class
words.
 Functional morphemes They are functional words in the language
such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. They are
closed class words.
Bound Morphemes
They cannot stand on their own and they are necessarily attached to
another morpheme, in most cases, free morphemes. They can be
divided into:
 Derivational morpheme: They are used to create new words,
words from a different grammatical category. E.x.:
Good (adjective) goodness (noun)
-ful, -less, -ish, -ly, -pre, ex-,dis-,co-,un-
 Inflectional morpheme: They do not change the category of the
word but are used to indicate aspects of the grammatical function,
for example, whether a word is singular or plural, if it is a
comparative or a superlative, or if it is in the past. English has
eight inflectional morphemes:

there are cases in which a morpheme can be both inflectional and

derivational:
teacher______derivtional verb-noun
taller________inflectional adjective –adjective
When both are present, the derivational morpheme must always come
first.

EXERCISES
Classify

1. unhappiness
2. repetition
3. contraception
4. entertainment
5. children
6. talked
7. ties
8. faster
9. written
10. broke
11. salmon
12. morphemic
13. wireless
14. landings
15. illness
16. fearfulness
17. imperfect
18.prearrange
19. jumping
20. neighbourhood
21.crossword
22.blackbird
23. transformative

Give two examples of

1. bound content morpheme
2. free content morpheme
3. free function morpheme