II

THE MORPHEMES

We may observe that a language must be systematic, for otherwise it could not be
learned or used consistently. A very basic observation is that each language contains two
systems; a system of sounds and a system of meanings. Only certain sounds are used by
speakers of any languages, and only certain combination of these sounds are possible and
have meaning.
The study of the production, transmission, and reception of speech sounds is
considered to be phonetics. A unit of sound representing a class of real sound is considered
to be a phoneme. A phoneme is considered to be a unit that distinguishes meaning. The
procedures for establishing the phonemes of a language; also, the system resulted is
phonology.

2.1. The Minimal Meaningful Units of Language

It was mentioned that phonemes were units that distinguished among meanings but
they did not in themselves carry meaning. To convey meaning, sounds are combined into
words. But in fact, words are not the smallest unit of meaning. Many words are made of
smaller units of meaning, and these units are combined in particular ways, forming words.
Morphology is the study of these meaning-bearing units and the rules governing them, the
study of the structure of words.
A unit of language that did bear meaning is considered to be a morpheme. The word is
derived from the Greek word morphe, meaning “form”. A morpheme, which sometimes is
designated with braces, { }, is the smallest meaning-bearing unit of language. For example, re-
is not a word, but it does carry meaning. In another word we can say that a morpheme is the
minimal linguistic unit which has a meaning, such as un- in the word unhappy, or grammatical
function, such as –s in the word cats.
Morphemes are generally short sequences of phonemes. The expression table is a
morpheme. It consists of short sequences of the following phonemes / t ei b l/. Some
morphemes can be usefully described as the smallest meaningful unit in the structure of the

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language. By ‘smallest meaningful unit’ we mean a unit, which cannot be divided without
destroying or drastically altering the meaning.
A morpheme is not identical with a syllable. Morphemes may consists of one or several
whole syllables, parts of syllables, or, in fact, any combination of phonemes without regard
to their status as syllables. For example the morpheme /streynj/ happened to be a syllable,
and so are many English morphemes, But /kenektikit/ as in Connecticut is a single morpheme,
though it contains four syllables. Both /gow/ and /z/ in goes are morphemes, though together
they are a word consisting of two morphemes but together they are a single syllable.
A morpheme may consist of only a single phoneme. The /z/ in goes just cited is a case.
But the phoneme /z/ and this morpheme are by no means identical. The phoneme occurs
many times where it has nothing to do with this morpheme. Instances are zoo /zuw/ and rose
/rowz/, both of which contain /z/ but have no meaning in common with the /z/ in goes.
Frequently two morphemic elements are alike in expression but different in content.
Such pairs are said to be homophonous, literally “sounding alike”. Thus /z/ is a morpheme
both in goes /gowz/ and goers /gowerz/, but not the same morpheme. The /z/ in goes means
‘third person singular actor’ and the /z/ in goers means ‘plural’. Both are homophonous.
Moreover, Stageberg (1965) defined morpheme as follow. A morpheme is a short
segment of language that meets three criteria:
1. It is a word, or part of a word that has meaning.
2. It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts without violation of its meaning
or without meaningless remainders.
3. It recurs in differing verbal environments with a relatively stable meaning.
Let us examine the word straight /stret/ in the light of these three criteria. First of all,
we recognize it as a word and can find it listed as such in any dictionary. Second, it cannot be
divided without violation of meaning. For example, we can, by dividing /stret/, get the smaller
meaningful forms of trait /tret/, rate /ret/, and ate /et/, but the meanings of these violate the
meaning of straight. Furthermore, when we divide it in these ways, we get the meaningless
remainders of /s-/, /st-/, and /str/. Third, straight recurs with a relatively stable meaning in
such environments as straightedge, straighten, and a straight line. Thus, straight meets all
the criteria of a morpheme.
There are two types of morphemes, free morphemes and bound morphemes. Both
types of morphemes can be explained as follows.

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2.2. Free Morphemes
Free morphemes are those morphemes that can occur in isolation without having to be
attached to some other grammatical unit, they occur freely, for examples wash, study, teach,
sit, etc. All free morphemes are words that stand on their own.
Free morphemes may have two functions, they are lexical morphemes and grammatical
morphemes.

2.2.1. Lexical Morphemes

Lexical morphemes are free morphemes that have independent dictionary meaning of
their own. That is, it is possible to look up these words and find their meaning. In English
language, lexical morphemes include nouns (man, place, school, occasion, etc.), verbs (bring,
come, take, give, etc), adjectives (happy, slow, bright, etc), adverbs, (here, there, now, then,
etc.). Lexical morphemes include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

2.2.2. Grammatical/Functional Morphemes

Grammatical/functional morphemes are those free morphemes that do not have
independent dictionary meaning of their own. That is, for these kinds of morpheme, it is quite
difficult to say exactly the meaning of such words when one looks them up in a dictionary.
These words are merely used to join the lexical words together in structure. Examples of
grammatical/functional morphemes in English include pronouns (he, she it), determiner (a,
the, some, that), preposition (on, at, in) and conjunction (and, or, but).

2.3. Bound Morphemes

Bound morphemes are the morphemes that cannot stand alone. Bound morphemes are
not complete words and cannot occur in isolation. They must be attached to other
grammatical units. On their own, their meaning cannot be realised. The examples of bound
morphemes are un-, -ize, -ation in the words unwipe, organize, and formation. Bound
morphemes come in different varieties, before the base of a word or after the base of a word,
like the examples above.
Bound morphemes can be clitics or affixes. A clitic seems to be a separate word but
unlike a word cannot be stressed and must occupy a particular position in a sentence where
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it is bound to its host. A clitic can attach to any free or root morpheme (whether noun or verb)
as long as the free/root morpheme is located at the appropriate position. There are two types
of clitics: a proclitic and an enclitic. Whereas a proclitic occurs before its host, an enclitic
occurs after its host.

EXERCISE 1
After each word write a number showing how many morphemes it contains.
1. play .......... 11. keeper ..........
2. replay .......... 12. able ..........
3. date .......... 13. unable ..........
4. antedate .......... 14. mahagony ..........
5. hygiene .......... 15. rain ..........
6. weak .......... 16. rainy ..........
7. weaken .......... 17. cheap ..........
8. man .......... 18. cheaply ..........
9. manly .......... 19. cheaper ..........
10. keep .......... 20. capsize ..........

EXERCISE 2
Write the meaning of the italicized morphemes.
1. antedate ...................................................
2. replay ...................................................
3. manly ...................................................
4. keeper ...................................................
5. unable ...................................................
6. rainy ...................................................
7. cheapest ...................................................
8. inactive ...................................................
9. impossible ...................................................
10. malfunction (noun) ...................................................

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EXERCISE 3
All but one of the following Persian words consists of more than one morpheme. (Note: There
is no overt morpheme for the third person singular pronoun ‘he’, so the word [xarid] contains
only one morpheme.)

a) [xaridam] ‘I bought’
b) [xaridi] ‘you (sg.) bought’
c) [xarid] ‘(he) bought’
d) [naxaridam]‘I did not buy’
e) [namixaridand] ‘they were not buying’
f) [naxaridim] ‘we did not buy’
g) [mixarid] ‘(he) was buying’
h) [mixaridid] ‘you (pl) were buying’

1) Try to match each of the following notions with a morpheme in the Persian data.
a) I e) they
b) you (sg) f) not
c) we g) was/were + -ing (continuous)
d) you (pl) h) buy

2) How would you say the followings in Persian?

a) They were buying.
b) You (sg) did not buy.
c) You (sg) were buying.

2.4. Roots , Stems, and Bases

2.4.1. Roots
Roots are another word for describing free morphemes. Like the term suggests, it is the
part of the word to which bound morphemes can be added to make other meanings of a
word. The root constitutes the core of the word which cannot be divided further. A root can
be a free root or a bound root. Here are examples of free root morphemes in the following
words:
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 im-proper
un-interrupt
practic-able
A bound root morpheme on the other hand, is the kind of morpheme that cannot occur
in isolation. It always occurs with other word-building elements attached to it (Katamba,
1993). A bound root can be contracted or non-contracted. A contracted root is a type of root
where one or more of its members have been deleted. The deleted part of the root can be
indicated by the use of an apostrophe before attaching the contracted part to some other
word in some writing systems. This is the case in English as the following examples show:
(a) I’ll (I will)
(b) We’ve (We have)
The contracted roots in the above examples are will and have.
Examples of non-contracted roots in English include –mit (as in permit, remit, submit),
-dent (as in dental, dentist, dentition), econom- (as in economy, economic, economics). The
non-contracted roots require other bound elements to occur before or after them.

2.4.2. Stems
A stem is a part of a word that is in existence before any inflectional or derivational
affixes having been added. For example:
Noun stem Plural
Cat -s
Worker -s
In the word form cats, the plural inflectional affix –s is attached to the simple stem cat, which
is a bare root, i.e. the irreducible core of the word. In workers the same inflectional –s suffix
comes after a slightly more complex stem consisting of the root work plus the suffix –er which
is used to form nouns from verbs. Here work is the root, but worker is the stem to which –s is
attached.

2.4.3. Bases
A base any unit whatsoever to which affixes on any kind can be added. The affixes
attached to a base may be inflectional affixes selected for syntactic reasons or derivational
affixes which alter the meaning or grammatical category of the base. An unadorned root like
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boy can be a base since it can have attached to it inflectional affiexes like –s to form plural
boys or derivational affixes like –ish to turn the noun boy into the adjective boyish. In other
words, all roots are bases. Bases are called stems only in the context of inflectional
morphology.

Exercise
Identify the roots, bases and stems in the following
1) Faiths 5) frogmarched
2) Faithfully 6) bookshops
3) Unfaithful 7) windowcleaners
4) Faithfulness 8) hardships

I hope your solution is like this:

Roots Stems Bases
faith faith faith
frog frogmarch faithful
march bookshop frogmarch
clean windowcleaner bookshop
hard hardship window-clean
window window-cleaner
hardship