This document discusses bound and free morphemes. Free morphemes can stand alone as words, while bound morphemes cannot and are always attached to free morphemes. It provides examples of affixes like prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. It also discusses roots, stems, and how words are formed by combining roots and affixes into stems and full words. Finally, it notes that morphemes and syllables should not be confused, as morphemes can be syllabic or non-syllabic.

1. 1
Bound and free morphemes
Free morphemes:
o constitute words by themselves – boy, car, desire, gentle, man
o can stand alone
Bound morphemes:
o can’t stand alone – always parts of words - occurattachedto free
morphemes
cats: cat free morpheme
-s  bound morpheme
undesirable:desire  free morpheme
-un, -able  bound morphemes
o affixes
o prefixes – occurbefore other morphemes
 unhappy, discontinue, rewrite, bicycle, bipolar
o suffixes – following other morphemes
 sleeping, excited, desirable
o infixes – inserted into other morphemes
 Bontoc, a language in the Philipines –
fikas ‘strong’ fumicas ‘to be strong’
kilad ‘red’ kumilad ‘to be red’
 English
full word obscenities into another word –
in+fuggin+credible
also+bloomin+lately
o circumfixes – attached to another morpheme both initially and finally
 German
Past participle of irregular verbs – ge+lieb+t
Roots and Stems

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o morphologically complex words consist of
a root + one or more morpheme(s)
o root
 a lexical content morpheme that
 cannot be analyzed into smaller
 painter , reread, conceive
 may or may not stand alone as a word
 read, -ceive
o stem
 a root morpheme + affix
 may or may not be a word
 painter  both a words and a stem
 -ceive+er only a stem
 as we add an affix to a stem, a new stem and a new word are formed
root: believe
stem: believe + able
word: un + believe + able
root: system
stem: system + atic
stem: un+ system + atic
stem: un+ system + atic + al
word: un+ system + atic + al + ly
Morphemes and syllables
The terms morpheme and syllable should not be confused:
 many morphemes are syllabic (i.e., contain at least one vowel) - cat
 many others are non-syllabic (contain no vowels): -s  'more than one'