Morphemes

Morphology 

It is the study of formation of words, of the structure of words. 

The concepts such as ‘morphemes’, ‘morphs’ and ‘allomorphs’ are basic to the study of morphology. 

Morphology centers on the various morphemes that make up a word. 

In linguistics, a morpheme is the tiniest grammatical unit in a language. 

A morpheme is any of the minimal units of speech which carry a meaning or function. 

There are two types of morphemes:

• Unbound morphemes
• Bound morphemes

An unbound morpheme is the opposite of a bound morpheme, a word element that cannot stand alone as a word. 

• Content words are sometimes called the open class words because we can regularly add new words to these classes. 
• Function words play a grammatical role; they connect the content words to the larger grammatical context. 

Bound morphemes cannot self stand, and must be attached to other morphemes. 

• Inflectional morphemes impact the base words to signal a change in quantity, person, gender, or tense while leaving the base word’s class unchanged.  
• Derivational morphemes contemplate on lexical because they impact the base word as stated to its grammatical and lexical class, resulting in a drastic change to the base. 

Prefixes: Bound morphemes that link to the beginning of a root. 

Suffixes: Bound morphemes that link to the end of a root.