Derivational And Inflectional Morphemes

1664 Words7 Pages
Derivational and inflectional morphemes Prefixes and suffixes are by definition always bound, but what about the stems? Are they always free? In English, some stems that occur with negative prefixes are not free, such as -kempt and -sheveled. Morphemes can also be divided into the two categories of content and function morphemes, a distinction that is conceptually distinct from the free-bound distinction but that partially overlaps with it in practice. The idea behind this distinction is that some morphemes express some general sort of content, in a way that is as independent as possible of the grammatical system of a particular language -- while other morphemes are heavily tied to a grammatical function, expressing syntactic relationships between units in a sentence, or obligatorily-marked categories such as number or tense. Thus (the stems of) nouns, verbs, adjectives are typically content morphemes: "throw," "green," "Kim," and "sand" are all English content morphemes. Content morphemes are also often called "open-class" morphemes, because they belong to categories that are open to the invention of arbitrary new items. People are always making up or borrowing new morphemes in these categories.: "smurf," "nuke," "byte," "grok." By contrast, prepositions ("to", "by"), articles ("the", "a"), pronouns ("she", "his"), and conjunctions are typically function morphemes, since they either serve to tie elements together grammatically ("hit by a truck," "Kim and Leslie," "Lee saw his dog"), or express obligatory (in a given language!) morphological features like definiteness ("she found a table" or "she found the table" but not "*she found table"). Function morphemes are also called "closed-class" morphemes, because they belong to categories that are essentially closed to invention or borrowing -- it is very difficult to add a new preposition, article or pronoun.

More about Derivational And Inflectional Morphemes

Open Document