TIG053 Morphology

Question 1

Free Morphemes

Answer 1

Morphemes that can stand by
themselves as single words.

Ex. “New” and “Tour”

1. Lexical Morphemes
2. Functional Morphemes

Question 2

Lexical Morphemes

Answer 2

Free Morpheme.
Words that carry “content” of the messages we want to convey.

We can add new lexical
morphemes to the language rather easily, so they are treated as an “open” class of words.

Ex. “Girl”, “House”
Ex. Set of ordinary nouns (girl, house), verbs (break, sit), adjectives (long, sad) and adverbs
(never, quickly)

Question 3

Functional Morpheme

Answer 3

Free Morpheme.

Used as a function word.

We almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a “closed” class of words.

Ex. Articles (a, the), conjunctions (and, because), prepositions (on, near) and pronouns (it, me).

Question 4

Bound Morpheme

Answer 4

A morpheme that cannot stand alone and must be attached to another form.

1. Derivational Morpheme
2. Inflectional Morpheme

Ex. “-s”, “-ed”, “un-“, “pre-“

Question 5

Derivational Morpheme

Answer 5

Bound Morpheme

We use these bound forms to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem.

Ex. Addition of the derivational morpheme “-ment” changes the verb “encourage” to the noun “encouragement”

Question 6

Inflectional Morphemes

Answer 6

Bound Morpheme.

These are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate the grammatical function of a word.

Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form.

English has only eight inflectional morphemes, all suffixes.

Ex. “-s”, “-‘s”, “-ed”