It is the study of the basic
building blocks of meaning in
language
Derivational
happiness ← happy + ness; preview ← pre + view.
Inflectional
plays ← play + s; cooler ← cool + er.
Cramberry
permit, commit, submit
Content
car, -able, -un.
Function
and, plural -s
Morpheme: The smallest linguistic
piece with a grammar function
Free Morpheme
Roots
Bound morpheme
Prefixes: Re-writte; mis-lead; re-turn
Suffixes: kind-ness; quick-ly; bad-ly;
Infixes: (not usual in english) speech-ometer;
Derivational Morphemes
Fundamental changes to the
meaning of a word/stem
Noun ← Adj
Verb ←Noun
Adj ← Adv
Sometimes it can remain
the same: Noun ← Noun
(friend ← friendship)
Derivational Pattern (DP)
Addition of a derivational suffix or other affix usually
applies to words of one lexical category (part of speech)
and changes them into words of another category
Combination of bases and affix.
It's regularly produced
Indicates
part-of-speech
meanings
Prefixes: go before the root
Suffixes: go after the root
Inflectional
Used to mark grammatical
info
Mental system involved in the word
formation
Studies the internal
structures of words, in
general
Free Morphemes
Stand alone with a specific meaning
eat, date, weak
Bound Morphemes
Cannot stand alone with meaning ← It 's always
added to one or more morphemes to form a
word
(ly) in greatly
(un) in unable
(ally) in occasionally
(less) in helpless
Compound: The process of putting two words
together to form a new one