Definition of Morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest syntactical and meaningful linguistic unit that contains a word, or an element of the word such as the use of –s whereas this unit is not divisible further into smaller syntactical parts.

For instance, in the sentence, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” (A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens), all the underlined words are morphemes, as they cannot be divided further into smaller units.

Types of Morpheme

There are two types of morphemes which are:

1. Free Morpheme
   The free morpheme is just a simple word that has a single morpheme; thus, it is free and can occur independently. For instance, in “David wishes to go there,” “go” is a free morpheme.
2. Bound Morpheme
   By contrast to a free morpheme, a bound morpheme is used with a free morpheme to construct a complete word, as it cannot stand independently. For example, in “The farmer wants to kill duckling,” the bound morphemes “-er,” “s,” and “ling” cannot stand on their own. They need free morphemes of “farm,” “want” and “duck” to give meanings.

Bound morphemes are of two types which include:

1. Inflectional Morpheme
   This type of morpheme is only a suffix. It transforms the function of words by adding -ly as a suffix to the base of the noun, such as in “friend,” which becomes “friendly.” Now it contains two morphemes “friend” and “-ly.” Here, “-ly” is an inflectional morpheme, as it has changed the noun “friend” into an adjective “friendly.”
2. Derivational Morpheme
   This type of morpheme uses both prefix as well as suffix, and has the ability to change function as well as meaning of words. For instance, adding the suffix “-less” to the noun “meaning” makes the meaning of this word entirely different.