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Making Sense of Morphemes
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A GrammarBook.com reader recently wrote to us with a question about the use
of morphemes in American English. We thought this was a good opportunity to
review the subject in further understanding the structure and parts of our
language.
Language, like matter, can be broken down from its largest to its smallest
components. The five grammatical units of English are sentence, clause,
phrase, word, and, the least of them, the morpheme. (An alphabet letter
would not be considered a grammatical unit.)
Dictionary.com defines a morpheme as “any of the minimal grammatical
units of language, each constituting a word or meaningful part of a word,
that cannot be divided into smaller independent grammatical parts, such as
‘the,’ ‘write,’ or the ‘-ed’ of
‘waited.’ ”
Every word in American English includes at least one morpheme. A morpheme
differs from a word mainly in that it may or may not stand alone, whereas a
word, by definition, is always independent.
When a morpheme can stand alone with its own meaning, it is a root, or the base to which other morphemes can be added (e.g., dog, cat, house). When a morpheme depends on another
morpheme to complete its idea, it is an affix (e.g., -est
needs fast to function for the superlative fastest; il- needs logical to help us state something is
“not” logical).
Thus, morphemes are either free (root) or bound (affix). A free morpheme has its own meaning. A bound morpheme does not; both prefixes and suffixes are bound morphemes.
Consider the morphemes in the following words; the bound morphemes are italicized and separated from the free morphemes by hyphens:
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| multi-million-aire |
un-certain-ty |
| trans-continent-al |
dis-agree-ment |
| tele-graph-y |
peace-ful-ness |
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Pop Quiz
In the following words, identify if the italicized morpheme is free or
bound.
1. uncommon
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
2. honorary
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
3. provocative
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
4) inflectional
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
5) capitalization
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
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Wordplay
To complement this week's morpheme topic, we found this timeless quote often attributed (or misattributed) to Mark Twain from the late 1800s:
"If you don't read the newspapers, you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed."
Obviously, the quote highlights the important difference the bound morphemes un- and mis- give to the free morpheme inform. However, it also shows us that a word can be made up of two free morphemes: news + paper = newspaper.
Pop Quiz Answers
1. uncommon
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
2. honorary
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
3. provocative
a) free morpheme (the root is provoke)
b) bound morpheme
4) inflectional
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
5) capitalization
a) free morpheme
b) bound morpheme
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