Eduardo Mondlane University
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
ELT- Day Shift, Third Year –LDE
Lecturer: Gaspar Nhabinde
Student: Samuel Matsinhe
Types of Morphemes
1. Roots, affixes, stems and bases
A root is a central part of a word that cannot be reduced, and it comes with nothing attached to it.
It is part that is present in the various manifestations of a lexeme. In words such as, walk, walked,
walking and walks, [walk] is the root as it appears in the set of word-forms that constitute it.
Suppletion takes place when the word-forms representing the same morpheme do not share a
common root morpheme. The words, good and better are word-forms that realize the lexeme
[good], but only good is phonetically similar to [good].
a) Free morphemes-are those capable of standing independently in a sentence. The following
words may stand independently in sentence:
E.g.: [man], [book], [tea] and [sweet]
b) Lexical morphemes -free morphemes are examples of lexical morphemes and they carry
most of the semantic content of the utterances. They cover notions referring to individual,
attribute properties, describe actions and process or states, express relations and describe
circumstances like manner. They are nouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions, and adverbs.
c) Function morphemes-are also examples of free morphemes and they signal of
grammatical information or logical relations in a sentence. They include articles,
demonstratives, pronouns, conjunctions. However, there are morphemes which do not fit
neatly into either category. Although they signal a logical relationship, at the same time,
they appear to have a more considerably a descriptive semantic content than say, the article
the. Therefore, the distinction between lexical and function morphemes is not always clear.
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d) Bound morphemes
Bound morphemes are those incapable of occurring in isolation. They always occur with some
other word-building elements attached to them.
E.g: [-mit] as in [permit] and [remit]
[-ceive], as in [perceive] and [receive]
[Pred] as in [predator] and [predatory]
[Sed] as in [sedan] and [sedate]
These bound roots co-occur with forms like [de-], [-ate] and [-ment], which re-occur with
numerous other prefixes and suffixes. Roots tend to have a core meaning which in some way is
modified by the affix, but determining its meaning can be tricky.
A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning or grammatical function. However, there morphemes
that lack meaning, instead they suggest it. Thus, morphemes are better recognized not only by their
meaning but distributional units.
2. Affixes are bound morphemes that only occur when attached to other morphemes or a
morpheme, be them roots, stems or bases.
a) Prefixes – are types of affixes that are attached before a root, stem or base.
Examples: [re-mark], [un-kind] and [in-decent]
b) Suffixes- are types of affixes that are attached after the root, stem or base.
Examples: [kind-ly], [wait-er], [book-s] and [walk-ed]
c) Infixes- are types of affixes that are inserted into the root itself.
This is not common in English, however there are some common contemporary examples
of infixing in English as in following examples.
[Kangaroo] [ kang-bloody-roo]
[Impossible] [in-fuckin-possible]
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3. Roots, stems and bases
A stem is the part of the word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes have been added.
They are bases that occur in the context of inflectional morphology.
Noun stem plural
[cat] [s]
[worker] [s]
Stem extender- the plural of child, is formed by adding the [–en], however, this can only be added
after the stem has been extended by attaching [–r-].
Base
Any unit to which affixes of any kind can be attached. These affixes attached to the base can be
inflectional affixes selected for syntactic reasons or derivational affixes which alter the meaning
or grammatical category of the base.
4. Derivational morphemes
Derivational morphemes are those that form new words by:
Changing the meaning of the base to which it is attached.
[Kind] [un-kind]
Changing the word class that a base belongs to
[simple]adjective [simpify]verb
5. Inflectional morphemes
Inflectional morphemes are those that do not change the referential or cognitive meaning.
They only modify the form of a word to fit into particular syntactic slot. Unlike derivational
morphemes these types of morphemes neither change the meaning of the base nor the
word-class.
Suffix stem function Examples
-s N plural book-s
-s V 3rd person, singular present sleep-s
-ed V past tense walk-ed
