Making Sense of Morphemes

Having trouble viewing this message? [Click here to view it online.]( To unsubscribe or change contact details, scroll to the bottom and follow the link. [GrammarBook.com]( Your #1 Source for Grammar and Punctuation Making Sense of Morphemes A GrammarBook.com reader recently wrote to us with a question about the use of morphemes in American English. We thought this was a good opportunity to review the subject in further understanding the structure and parts of our language. Language, like matter, can be broken down from its largest to its smallest components. The five grammatical units of English are sentence, clause, phrase, word, and, the least of them, the morpheme. (An alphabet letter would not be considered a grammatical unit.) Dictionary.com defines a morpheme as “any of the minimal grammatical units of language, each constituting a word or meaningful part of a word, that cannot be divided into smaller independent grammatical parts, such as ‘the,’ ‘write,’ or the ‘-ed’ of ‘waited.’ ” Every word in American English includes at least one morpheme. A morpheme differs from a word mainly in that it may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is always independent. When a morpheme can stand alone with its own meaning, it is a root, or the base to which other morphemes can be added (e.g., dog, cat, house). When a morpheme depends on another morpheme to complete its idea, it is an affix (e.g., -est needs fast to function for the superlative fastest; il- needs logical to help us state something is “not” logical). Thus, morphemes are either free (root) or bound (affix). A free morpheme has its own meaning. A bound morpheme does not; both prefixes and suffixes are bound morphemes. Consider the morphemes in the following words; the bound morphemes are italicized and separated from the free morphemes by hyphens: multi-million-aire un-certain-ty trans-continent-al dis-agree-ment tele-graph-y peace-ful-ness Understanding morphemes helps us better recognize how words are formed and frees us to work with linguistic parts more aptly in achieving written precision. [View and comment on this article on our website.]( [Click here to watch our video on Effective Writing]( Pop Quiz In the following words, identify if the italicized morpheme is free or bound. 1. uncommon a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme 2. honorary a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme 3. provocative a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme 4) inflectional a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme 5) capitalization a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation by Lester Kaufman and Jane Straus The Authority on English Grammar! 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You may assign quizzes to your students and employees and have their scores tallied, organized, and reported to you! Let [GrammarBook.com]( take the hassle out of teaching English! "Fun to test my skills." "The explanations really help ... thanks!" "I can select the quizzes to assign to my students, and then the results are reported to me automatically!" [Find out more about our subscription packages]( If you think you have found an error in a quiz, please email us at help@grammarbook.com Wordplay To complement this week's morpheme topic, we found this timeless quote often attributed (or misattributed) to Mark Twain from the late 1800s: "If you don't read the newspapers, you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." Obviously, the quote highlights the important difference the bound morphemes un- and mis- give to the free morpheme inform. However, it also shows us that a word can be made up of two free morphemes: news + paper = newspaper. --------------------------------------------------------------- Pop Quiz Answers 1. uncommon a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme 2. honorary a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme 3. provocative a) free morpheme (the root is provoke) b) bound morpheme 4) inflectional a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme 5) capitalization a) free morpheme b) bound morpheme English in a Snap: 68 One-Minute English Usage Videos FREE Learn all about who and whom, affect and effect, subjects and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, commas, semicolons, quotation marks, and much more by just sitting back and enjoying these easy-to-follow lessons. Share them with your colleagues (and boss), children, teachers, and friends as well! [Click here to watch](. Forward this e-newsletter to your friends and colleagues. If you received this FREE weekly e-newsletter from a friend, [click here to have it sent to you each week](. 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