Today some grammar: morpheme – the basics. What is a morpheme and how are morphemes classified? I’m sure you’ve come across the term ‘morpheme’ on some occasion, maybe at school. In this post I’ll try to enlarge on this topic a bit.
But before we start, here’s the video from my YouTube channel that deals with this topic:
If you also want to read about morphemes, let’s start with the definition:
morpheme – the smallest unit of meaning
And now some examples. Let’s take the noun ‘friend’ as an example. It consists of just one morpheme. If you add the plural ending to it, there will be two morphemes: ‘friend’ with the main meaning of the noun and ‘s’ with the meaning ‘plural’. So, endings are morphemes that carry their own meaning. The same is true about prefixes. Here are some examples of morphemes. I’m pretty sure you will know what meaning each of the suffixes and prefixes below add to the main meaning:
| friend | 1 morpheme | friend |
| friend’s | 2 morphemes | friend + ’s |
| friends | 2 morphemes | friend + s |
| friends’ | 3 morphemes | friend + s + ’ |
| friendly | 2 morphemes | friend + ly |
| friendliness | 3 morphemes | friend + ly + ness |
| befriend | 2 morphemes | be + friend |
| befriended | 3 morphemes | be + friend + ed |
| befriending | 3 morphemes | be + friend + ing |
| unfriendly | 3 morphemes | un + friend + ly |
| unfriendlier | 4 morphemes | un + friend + ly + er |
| unfriendliness | 4 morphemes | un + friend + ly + ness |
bound vs free morpheme
How do we classify morphemes? Well, morphemes may be bound or free.
Free morphemes can stand alone:
friend dog go nice good
Bound morphemes must be attached to free morphemes as prefixes or suffixes:
meaning beautiful dislike smallest undeniable
Bound morphemes may be further classified as derivational morphemes and inflectional ones:
| – can change the class of the word |
| – can change the semantic meaning of the word |
| – never change the class of the word |
| – never change the semantic meaning of the word |
derivational morphemes
Some examples of derivational morphemes:
Here we have change of class:
rich
happy
enrich
happiness
adjective → verb
adjective → noun
Here we have change of semantic meaning:
agree
king
disagree
kingdom
positive → negative
person → country
inflectional morphemes
As far as inflectional morphemes are concerned, there are 8 of them in English with the following grammatical functions:
| -s | plural | dogs |
| -‘s / -‘ | possessive | boy’s / boys’ |
| -s | 3rd person singular in present tense | speaks |
| -ed | regular past tense | walked |
| -ed | regular past participle | printed |
| -ing | present participle | talking |
| -er | comparative degree | smaller |
| -est | superlative degree | earliest |
As you can see, morphemes are something that we use in our speech, or, to be more precise, something our speech consists of. We are not always aware of that, but from now on, I hope this will change.