What is morphology? Classify the morphemes in detail.

Answer

What is morphology? Classify the morphemes in detail.

Or, What do you understand by morpheme? Discuss the features of free morphemes and bound morphemes. 

Morphology is the study of word structure. It deals with the smallest units of meaning in a language. These meaning units are called morphemes in linguistics. Understanding morphology and morphemes is important for learning languages. The study is very important in language teaching, reading, and word formation. To begin with, we will discuss the first major point.

Definition: According to The Cambridge Dictionary, Morphology is “the study of the form of words and phrases.” Morpheme is “the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning, either a word or a part of a word.”

The Classification of Morphemes: The classification of Morphemes is very deep. Let us now discuss it in detail.

• Free Morphemes: Free morphemes are words that stand alone. They do not need any extra parts. They carry full meaning by themselves in sentences. Free morphemes are divided into “Lexical type” and “Functional type.”

A1. Lexical (Content) Morphemes: Lexical morphemes are the main words of the language. They give the basic content or idea. These words include nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Examples are “cat,” “run,” “happy,” and “quickly.” They can join together to make bigger words. Example: “book” and “case” make “bookcase.”

A2. Functional (Function) Morphemes: Functional morphemes help to make sentences work. They show relationships between content words. These are words like prepositions, articles, conjunctions, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs. Examples are “and,” “but,” “the,” “she,” “with,” and “is.” Functional morphemes do not have a clear meaning alone. They are needed for correct grammar in language.

• Bound Morphemes: Bound morphemes cannot stand alone. They must join another word or morpheme. They give extra meaning or change the work or form. There are two types: derivational and inflectional morphemes.

B1. Derivational Morphemes: Derivational morphemes make new words. They can also change the word class. There are prefixes