Morphology is the study of the internal structure of the words. Morphemes are the minimal meaningful unit or a grammatical function. These morphemes come under the label morphology. There are two types of morphemes – free morpheme and bound morpheme.
Free Morpheme:
Free morphemes are the words which can stand by themselves. Example – take, note.
This free morpheme is further divided into two groups, namely – function and lexical morpheme.
- Functional Morpheme:
Prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns come under this type of morpheme.
- Lexical Morpheme:
These are words having fixed elements which are added to some English words. Nouns, adjectives and verbs take this place. In words such as ‘talked’, talk is a fixed word wherein ‘ed’ joins it to form a lexical morpheme.
Examples – open, give, fix
Bound Morpheme:
The words that cannot stand on its own are said to be bound morphemes.
Example – res-ist-ed
This type of morpheme is further categories as inflectional and derivational.
- Inflectional Morpheme:
These are not meant to change the grammatical category but to indicate the aspects of the grammatical form. It says whether a word is singular or plural. Eg. talk, talked, talking. Here ‘talk’ is a verb where forms like ‘ed’, ‘ing’ are combined which still does not change the grammatical category of that particular word.
- Derivational Morpheme:
These morphemes can create new words in word forms which will change the grammatical category of a word. Some prefixes or suffixes can change the whole meaning of a word. Eg. Book+ish, dis+satisfaction