what means morphemes
In linguistics, 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. Inflectional morphemes modify a verb 's tense or a noun's number without affecting the word's meaning or class. 2  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. 3  In English, there are eight inflections.