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    Free and Bound Morphemes

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    Ahmed S. Mubarak
    This document discusses different types of morphemes in English. It distinguishes between free morphemes, which can stand alone as words like "open" and "tour", and bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone and are attached to other forms, like the prefixes "re-" and suffixes "-ist" and "-ed". It notes that affixes are bound morphemes. The document also discusses how free morphemes can be divided into lexical morphemes, which carry the content words of language like nouns and verbs, and functional morphemes, which are function words like conjunctions and prepositions.

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    Free and Bound Morphemes

    Uploaded by

    Ahmed S. Mubarak
    274 views2 pages
    This document discusses different types of morphemes in English. It distinguishes between free morphemes, which can stand alone as words like "open" and "tour", and bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone and are attached to other forms, like the prefixes "re-" and suffixes "-ist" and "-ed". It notes that affixes are bound morphemes. The document also discusses how free morphemes can be divided into lexical morphemes, which carry the content words of language like nouns and verbs, and functional morphemes, which are function words like conjunctions and prepositions.

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    This document discusses different types of morphemes in English. It distinguishes between free morphemes, which can stand alone as words like "open" and "tour", and bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone and are attached to other forms, like the prefixes "re-" and suffixes "-ist" and "-ed". It notes that affixes are bound morphemes. The document also discusses how free morphemes can be divided into lexical morphemes, which carry the content words of language like nouns and verbs, and functional morphemes, which are function words like conjunctions and prepositions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    274 views2 pages

    Free and Bound Morphemes

    Uploaded by

    Ahmed S. Mubarak
    This document discusses different types of morphemes in English. It distinguishes between free morphemes, which can stand alone as words like "open" and "tour", and bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone and are attached to other forms, like the prefixes "re-" and suffixes "-ist" and "-ed". It notes that affixes are bound morphemes. The document also discusses how free morphemes can be divided into lexical morphemes, which carry the content words of language like nouns and verbs, and functional morphemes, which are function words like conjunctions and prepositions.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
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    The passage discusses different types of morphemes including free morphemes, bound morphemes, prefixes, suffixes, stems, and lexical and functional morphemes.

    Free morphemes, which can stand alone as words, and bound morphemes, which are affixes that cannot stand alone and are attached to other forms.

    Lexical morphemes, which are content words like nouns and verbs, and functional morphemes, which are function words like conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns.

    Free and bound morphemes

    From these examples, we can make a broad distinction between two types
    of morphemes.
    There are freemorphemes, that is, morphemes that can stand by
    themselves as
    single words, for example, open and tour. There are also bound
    morphemes, which are
    those forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to
    another form,
    exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. These forms were described in Chapter 5 as
    affixes. So, we
    can say that all affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in English are bound
    morphemes. The free
    morphemes can generally be identified as the set of separate English word
    forms such as
    basic nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. When they are used with bound
    morphemes
    attached, the basic word forms are technically known as stems. For
    example:
    undressed carelessness
    un- dress -ed care -less -ness
    prefix stem suffix stem suffix suffix
    (bound) (free) (bound) (free) (bound) (bound)
    We should note that this type of description is a partial simplification of
    the morphological
    facts of English. There are a number of English words in which the element
    treated as the stem is not, in fact, a free morpheme. In words such as
    receive, reduce and
    repeat, we can identify the bound morpheme re- at the beginning, but the
    elements
    -ceive, -duce and -peat are not separate word forms and hence cannot be
    free morphemes.
    These types of forms are sometimes described as bound stems to keep
    them
    distinct from free stems such as dress and care.

    Lexical and functional morphemes


    What we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The
    first category
    is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that we think of as the
    words that
    carry the content of the messages we convey. These free morphemes
    are called
    lexical morphemes and some examples are: girl, man, house, tiger, sad,
    long, yellow,
    sincere, open, look, follow, break. We can add new lexical morphemes to
    the language
    rather easily, so they are treated as an open class of words.
    Other types of free morphemes are called functional morphemes.
    Examples are

    and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them. This set
    consists largely
    of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions,
    articles and
    pronouns. Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the
    language,
    they are described as a closed class of words.

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