Topic: Morphemes Student: Mukhamedieva Zarina Group: 335

Topic: Morphemes

Student: Mukhamedieva Zarina

Group: 335

A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning. All morphemes bear a meaning.

Unladylike

• Unladylike

The word unladylike consists of three morphemes and four syllables.Morpheme breaks:

-un- 'not‘

-lady '(well behaved) female adult human‘

-like 'having the characteristics of‘

None of these morphemes can be broken up any more without losing all sense of meaning. Lady cannot be broken up into "la" and "dy," even though "la" and "dy" are separate syllables. Note that each syllable has no meaning on its own.

• Dogs
• The word dogs consists of two morphemes and one syllable:

- dog,and

-s, a plural marker on nouns

Classification of morphemes

Morphemes

Grammatical Lexical

Unbound Bound Unbound Bound

(free) (free)

Prepositions Inflectional Derivational Nouns

Articles Verbs

Conjunctions Adjectives

(at, the, and)

Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes

Lexical morphemes are those that having meaning by themselves (more accurately, they have sense). Grammatical morphemes specify a relationship between other morphemes. But the distinction is not all that well defined.

Nouns, verbs, adjectives ({boy}, {buy}, {big}) are typical lexical morphemes.

Prepositions, articles, conjunctions ({of}, {the}, {but}) are grammatical morphemes

Free and Bound Morphemes

- Free morphemes are those that can stand alone as words. They may be lexical morphemes ({serve}, {press}), or grammatical morphemes ({at}, {and}).

- Bound morphemes can occur only in combination—they are parts of a word. They may be lexical morphemes (such as {clude} as in include, exclude, preclude/receive, reduce ) or they may be grammatical (such as {PLU} = plural as in boys, girls, and cats).