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Free and bound morphemes

From these examples, we can make a broad distinction between two typesof morphemes.

There are freemorphemes, that is, morphemes that can stand by

themselves assingle words, for example, open and tour. There are also boundmorphemes, which arethose forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached toanother form,exemplied as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. These forms were described in Chapter asa!xes. "o, wecan say that all a!xes #prexes and su!xes$ in %nglish are boundmorphemes. The freemorphemes can generally be identied as the set of separate %nglish wordforms such asbasic nouns, ad&ectives, verbs, etc. 'hen they are used with bound

morphemesattached, the basic word forms are technically known as stems. Forexample(undressed carelessnessun- dress -ed care -less -nessprex stem su!x stem su!x su!x#bound$ #free$ #bound$ #free$ #bound$ #bound$'e should note that this type of description is a partial simplication ofthe morphologicalfacts of %nglish. There are a number of %nglish words in which the elementtreated as the stem is not, in fact, a free morpheme. )n words such as

receive, reduce andrepeat, we can identify the bound morpheme re- at the beginning, but theelements-ceive, -duce and -peat are not separate word forms and hence cannot befree morphemes.

These types of forms are sometimes described as *bound stems+ to keepthemdistinct from *free stems+ such as dress and care.

Lexical and functional morphemes

'hat we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The

rst categoryis that set of ordinary nouns, ad&ectives and verbs that we think of as thewords thatcarry the *content+ of the messages we convey. These free morphemesare calledlexical morphemes and some examples are( girl, man, house, tiger, sad,long, yellow,sincere, open, look, follow, break. 'e can add new lexical morphemes tothe languagerather easily, so they are treated as an *open+ class of words.ther types of free morphemes are called functional morphemes.

%xamples are

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and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them. This setconsists largelyof the functional words in the language such as con&unctions, prepositions,articles andpronouns. ecause we almost never add new functional morphemes to thelanguage,they are described as a *closed+ class of words.