Morphology

Linguistics is the study of language, and there is a lot to unpack about language, so why not start small? Words are the smallest unit of meaning in a language, right? Guess again! Small segments of sound that carry meaning—many even smaller than words—are called morphemes. There are many types of morphemes that can come together to make a single word.

Morphology is the study of these sub-word sounds and how they function to create meaning in language.

Morphology Definition

Consider the word smallest from the paragraph above. This word can be broken down into two segments that carry significance: small and -est. While -est isn’t a word in and of itself, it does carry significance that any English-speaking person should recognize; it essentially means “the most.”

Language includes everything from grammar to sentence structure, and the segments of language that we use to express meaning are most often words. Morphology deals with words and their makeup. But what are words made of?

In the example of the word smallest, the two segments small and -est come together to make a complete word. These building blocks are an example of individual morphemes.

When we put together the morphemes small (which is a word by itself) and -est (which is not a word but does mean something when added to a word) we get a new word that means something different from the word small.

Small – something slight in size.

Smallest – the most slight in size.

But what if we wanted to make a different word? There are other morphemes we can add to the root word small to make different combinations and, therefore, different words.

Morpheme Types

There are two major types of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes. The smallest example is made up of one of each of these types of morphemes.

Free Morphemes

A free morpheme is a morpheme that occurs alone and carries meaning as a word. Free morphemes are also called unbound or freestanding morphemes. You might also call a free morpheme a root word, which is the irreducible core of a single word.

These examples are all free morphemes because they cannot be subdivided into smaller pieces that hold significance. Free morphemes can be any type of word—whether an adjective, a noun, or anything else—they simply have to stand alone as a unit of language that conveys meaning.

You might be tempted to say that free morphemes are simply all words and leave it at that. This is true, but free morphemes are actually categorized as either lexical or functional according to how they function.

Lexical Morphemes

Lexical morphemes carry the content or meaning of a message.

You might think of them as the substance of language. To identify a lexical morpheme, ask yourself, “If I deleted this morpheme from the sentence, would it lose its meaning?” If this answer is yes, then you almost certainly have a lexical morpheme.

Functional Morphemes

As opposed to lexical morphemes, functional morphemes do not carry the content of a message. These are the words in a sentence that are more functional, meaning that they coordinate the meaningful words.

Remember that functional morphemes are still free morphemes, which means they can stand alone as a word with meaning. You wouldn’t categorize a morpheme such as re- or -un as a grammatical morpheme because they aren’t words that stand alone with meaning.

Bound Morphemes

Unlike lexical morphemes, bound morphemes are those that cannot stand alone with meaning. Bound morphemes must occur with other morphemes to create a complete word.

Many bound morphemes are affixes.

Not all bound morphemes are affixes, but they are certainly the most common form. Here are a few examples of affixes you might see:

Bound morphemes can do one of two things: they can change the grammatical category of the root word (derivational morpheme), or they can simply alter its form (inflectional morpheme).

Derivational Morphemes

When a morpheme changes the way you’d categorize the root word grammatically, it’s a derivational morpheme.

The root word poor is an adjective, but when you add the suffix -ly—which is a derivational morpheme—it changes to an adverb. Other examples of derivational morphemes include -ness, non-, and -ful.

Inflectional Morphemes

When a bound morpheme is attached to a word but does not change the root word's grammatical category, it is an inflectional morpheme. These morphemes simply modify the root word in some way.

Adding the -s to the end of the word fireplace did not change the word in any significant way—it simply modified it to reflect multiple rather than one single fireplace.

Morphology Examples

Sometimes it’s easier to see a visual representation of something than to explain it. Morphological trees do exactly that.

This example shows how the word unreachable can be broken into individual morphemes.

The morpheme able is an affix that changes the word reach (a verb) to reachable (an adjective.) This makes it a derivational morpheme.

After you add the affix un- you get the word unreachable which is the same grammatical category (adjective) as reachable, and so this is an inflectional morpheme.

The root word is motive (a noun) which, with the addition of the affix -ate becomes motivate (a verb). The addition of the bound morpheme -ion changes the verb motivate to the noun motivation.

Morphology and Syntax

Linguistics, the scientific study of language, is made up of several specific domains related to language. Starting from the smallest, most basic unit of language (phonetics) and graduating up to the study of discourse and contextual meaning (pragmatics), linguistics consists of the following sections:

• Phonetics

• Phonology

• Morphology

• Syntax

• Semantics

• Pragmatics

Morphology and syntax are close to one another in terms of the linguistic domain. While morphology studies the smallest units of meaning in language, syntax deals with how words are linked together to create meaning.

The difference between syntax and morphology is essentially the difference between studying how words are formed (morphology) and how sentences are formed (syntax).

Morphology and Semantics

Semantics is one level removed from morphology in the grand scheme of linguistic study. Semantics is the branch of linguistics responsible for understanding meaning in general. To understand the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text, you might rely on semantics.

Morphology also deals with meaning to a degree, but only in as much as the smaller sub-word units of language can carry meaning. To examine the meaning of anything larger than a morpheme would fall under the domain of semantics.