Morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest linguistic part of a word that can have a meaning. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful part of a word. Examples of morphemes are the parts "un-", "break", and "-able" in the word "unbreakable".

There are five types of morpheme:
 Free morpheme: a morpheme that can be joined either with other morphemes (such as unbreakable) or on its own (such as break)
 Bound morpheme: a morpheme that can be used only when joined to other morphemes (such as unbreakable)
 Derivational morpheme: a morpheme that can be derived (added) to another morpheme to create a new word (such as adding -ness to happy to form the new word happiness)
 Inflectional morpheme: a morpheme that can change a word's tense, number etc. (such as adding -s to dog to form the plural dogs)
 Allomorphs: different types of the same morpheme (for example, the morpheme ed can have the sound 'id' in the word hunted, the sound 't' in the word fished or the sound 'd' in the word buzzed)

Category:Linguistics