Bound and unbound morphemes

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In morphology, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the most basic unit of meaning) that
can appear only as part of a larger word; a free morpheme or unbound morpheme is
one that can stand alone or can appear with other morphemes in a lexeme.[1] A bound
morpheme is also known as a bound form, and similarly a free morpheme is a free
form.[2]

Contents [hide]
1 Roots and affixes
2 Word formation
3 Analytic and synthetic languages
4 See also
5 References
Roots and affixes[edit]
Many roots are free morphemes (ship- in "shipment"), and others are bound. Roots
normally carry lexical meaning. Words like chairman that contain two free morphemes
(chair and man) are referred to as compound words.

Affixes are always bound in English, but some languages like Arabic have forms that
sometimes affix to words and sometimes stand alone. English language affixes are
almost exclusively prefixes or suffixes: pre- in "precaution" and -ment in
"shipment". Affixes may be inflectional, indicating how a certain word relates to
other words in a larger phrase, or derivational, changing either the part of speech
or the actual meaning of a word.

Cranberry morphemes are a special form of bound morpheme whose independent meaning
has been displaced and serves only to distinguish one word from another, like in
cranberry, in which the free morpheme berry is preceded by the bound morpheme
cran-, meaning "crane" from the earlier name for the berry, "crane berry".

Word formation[edit]
Words can be formed purely from bound morphemes, as in English permit, ultimately
from Latin per "through" + mitto "I send", where per- and -mit are bound morphemes
in English. However, they are often thought of as simply a single morpheme.

A similar example is given in Chinese; most of its morphemes are monosyllabic and
identified with a Chinese character because of the largely morphosyllabic script,
but disyllabic words exist that cannot be analyzed into independent morphemes, such
as ?? h�di� 'butterfly'. Then, the individual syllables and corresponding
characters are used only in that word, and while they can be interpreted as bound
morphemes ? h�- and ? -di�, it is more commonly considered a single disyllabic
morpheme. See polysyllabic Chinese morphemes for further discussion.

Linguists usually distinguish between productive and unproductive forms when

speaking about morphemes. For example, the morpheme ten- in tenant was originally
derived from the Latin word tenere, "to hold", and the same basic meaning is seen
in such words as "tenable" and "intention." But as ten- is not used in English to
form new words, most linguists would not consider it to be a morpheme at all.

Analytic and synthetic languages[edit]

A language with a very low ratio of morphemes to words is an isolating language.
Since such a language uses few bound morphemes, it expresses most grammatical
relationships by word order or helper words, so it is an analytic language.

In contrast, a language that uses a substantial number of bound morphemes to

express grammatical relationships is a synthetic language.

See also[edit]
Fixed expression
Fossil word
Unpaired word
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Kroeger, Paul (2005). Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-521-01653-7.
Jump up ^ Elson and Pickett, Beginning Morphology and Syntax, SIL, 1968, ISBN 0-
88312-925-6, p6: Morphemes which may occur alone are called free forms; morphemes
which never occur alone are called bound forms.
Categories: Units of linguistic morphology
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