1. Morphology is the study of the internal structure, forms and classes of words. 2. A morpheme is the minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function in a word. For example, in "tourists" there are three morphemes: -tour, -ist, and -s. 3. Morphemes can be free, meaning they can stand alone as words, or bound, meaning they must be combined with other morphemes to form words.

1. Linguistics
The ninth week

2. Chapter 3 Morphology
 3.1 Introduction
 3.2 Morphemes

3. Key points
 1. the definition of morphology
 2. the definition of morpheme
 3. the classification of morphemes

4. Difficult points
 1. Free morphemes
 2. Bound morphemes

5. Morphology
 Morphology is the study of the internal
structure, forms and classes of words.

6. Morphemes
 A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or
grammatical function.
 Ex. Tourists: -tour (one minimal unit)
 -ist (meaning “person who
does something”)
 -s (a third unit of grammatical
function indicating plurality)

7. Free morphemes
 The morphemes that can stand alone as
words are called free morphemes.

8. Root and stem
 A word must contain an element that can
stand by itself, that is, a free morpheme,
such as talk. Such an element is called a
root. When they are used with bound
morphemes, the basic word-form involved is
technically known as the stem.

9. Lexical and functional morphemes
 Lexical morphemes refer to ordinary nouns,
verbs and adjectives.
 Functional morphemes refer to
conjunctions, articles, prepositions and
pronouns.

10. Open and closed class of words
 lexical morphemes are called an open
class of words because we can create
new lexical morphemes.
 functional morphemes are called a
closed class of words because no new
fellow members can be added.

11. Bound morphemes
 Bound morphemes are those that can
not be used independently but have to
be combined with other morphemes,
either free or bound, to form a word.

12. Occurrence position:
 Prefixes
 Suffixes
 infixes

13. Function:
 Derivational morphemes
 Inflectional morphemes

14. Eight English inflectional
morphemes:
 (i) –‘s (possessive)
 (ii) –s (plural)
 (iii) –s (3rd person present singular)
 (iv) –ing (present participle)
 (v) –ed (past tense)
 (vi) –ed (past participle)
 (vii) –en (past participle)
 (viii) –est and –er (superlative and comparative
degree)

15. The chart of the different categories
of morphemes

 Lexical morphemes (work, house,
kind)
Free morphemes
Morphemes Functional morphemes (and, if, or,
but)

 Derivational morphemes (-er, -ness,
-ly)
 Bound morphemes
 Inflectioanal morphemes (-ed, -er, -est)

16. 
 Lexical morphemes
 Free morphemes
 Functional morphemes
 Morphemes
 Derivational morphemes
 Bound morphemes
 Inflectional morphemes

17. Assignments
1. Define the following terms:
(1)morphology (2) free morpheme
(3) morpheme (4) stem
2. Identify the structure of the following words:
wording person existentialism
international statesman spokesman
walkman bicyclist assignment