Morphemes - the building blocks of morphology
Although words are the smallest independent units of language, they have an internal structure and are built up by even smaller pieces. There are simple words that don’t have an internal structure and only consist of one piece, like work. There is no way we can divide work (wo-rk?) into smaller parts that carry meaning or function. Complex words however, do have an internal structure and consist of two or more pieces. Consider worker, where the ending –er is added to the root work to make it into a noun meaning someone who works. These pieces are called morphemes and are the smallest meaning-bearing units of language.[4]
We said that words are independent forms, and a simple word only consisting of one single morpheme is therefore a free morpheme, that is, it is a word itself. Examples are house, work, high, us and to. Morphemes that must be attached to another morpheme to receive meaning are bound morphemes. If we break the word unkindness into its three morphemes un-, kind and -ness, we get two examples of bound morphemes: un- and -ness, as they require the root kind to make up a word. These are also called affixes as they are attached to the stem. The affix un- that go to the front of a word is a prefix and -ness that goes to the end is a suffix.
There are also infixes and circumfixes, although they are not very common in English. We mostly see infixes as curse words integrated in morphemes like the ones you can see below[5], or like the example from the American sitcom you can see below. A circumfix is a morpheme that attaches to the front and the back of a word, as you can see in the examples of Dutch past tense below:
The graphic shows free and bound morphemes according to positions
Morphemes - the building blocks of morphologyAlthough words are the smallest independent units of language, they have an internal structure and are built up by even smaller pieces. There are simple words that don’t have an internal structure and only consist of one piece, like work. There is no way we can divide work (wo-rk?) into smaller parts that carry meaning or function. Complex words however, do have an internal structure and consist of two or more pieces. Consider worker, where the ending –er is added to the root work to make it into a noun meaning someone who works. These pieces are called morphemes and are the smallest meaning-bearing units of language.[4] We said that words are independent forms, and a simple word only consisting of one single morpheme is therefore a free morpheme, that is, it is a word itself. Examples are house, work, high, us and to. Morphemes that must be attached to another morpheme to receive meaning are bound morphemes. If we break the word unkindness into its three morphemes un-, kind and -ness, we get two examples of bound morphemes: un- and -ness, as they require the root kind to make up a word. These are also called affixes as they are attached to the stem. The affix un- that go to the front of a word is a prefix and -ness that goes to the end is a suffix.There are also infixes and circumfixes, although they are not very common in English. We mostly see infixes as curse words integrated in morphemes like the ones you can see below[5], or like the example from the American sitcom you can see below. A circumfix is a morpheme that attaches to the front and the back of a word, as you can see in the examples of Dutch past tense below:The graphic shows free and bound morphemes according to positions
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