a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language.

In other words, it is the smallest

meaningful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called
morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the
two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is
freestanding. When it stands by itself, it is considered a root because it has a meaning of its
own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it
is an affix because it has a grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to specify that it is
plural).[1] Every word comprises one or more morphemes. The more combinations a
morpheme is found in, the more productive it is said to be.[2]

Contents
 1 Classification of morphemes
o 1.1 Free and bound Morphemes
 1.1.1 Classification of Bound morphemes
 1.1.1.1 Derivational morphemes
 1.1.1.2 Inflectional morphemes
o 1.2 Allomorphs
o 1.3 Zero morphemes/null morphemes
o 1.4 Content vs. function
 2 Additional notes
 3 Morphological analysis
 4 Changing definitions of morpheme
 5 See also
o 5.1 Linguistics
o 5.2 Lexicology
 6 References
 7 External links

Classification of morphemes
Free and bound Morphemes

Every morpheme can be classified as either free or bound.[3] These categories are mutually
exclusive, and as such, a given morpheme will belong to exactly one of them.

 Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear
with other lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
 Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root
and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only
accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English
are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes, examples of suffixes are: tion, ation,
ible, ing, etc. Bound morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes.

Classification of Bound morphemes

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional.

Derivational morphemes
  Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change either the semantic
meaning or part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness,
the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an
adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a
derivational morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word formed by the root
kind. Generally the affixes used with root word are the bound morphemes.

Inflectional morphemes

 Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense or a noun's number without affecting

the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words
are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.
Generally it changes the form of a word, such as changing the form of verb, changing
singular to plural, changing gender, parts of speech. In English, there are eight
inflections.

Allomorphs