The Branches of Morpheme "Free Morpheme and Bound Morpheme"

Morphemes

A morpheme can be defined as a minimal unit having more or less constant meaning and more of less constant form.

Free and Bound Morphemes

Free morphemes are those that can stand alone as words.
Also called an unbound morpheme or a free-standing morpheme. They may be lexical morphemes ({serve}, {press}), or grammatical morphemes ({at}, {and}).

Free morphemes :

• constitute words by themselves – boy, car, desire, gentle, man.
• can stand alone

Bound morphemes can occur only in combination—they are parts of a word.

They may be lexical morphemes (such as {clude} as in include, exclude, preclude) or they may be grammatical (such as {PLU} = plural as in boys, girls, and cats).

Bound morphemes :

1. can’t stand alone – always parts of words - occur attached to free morphemes. cats:  cat à free morpheme         
     -s à bound morpheme 
   undesirable: desire à free morpheme             
                        -un, -able à bound morphemes
   
2.  affixes

• prefixes – occur before other morphemes.ex : unhappy, discontinue, rewrite, bicycle, bipolar
• suffixes – following other morphemes.ex : sleeping, excited, desirable.
• infixes – inserted into other morphemes.
•  circumfixes – attached to another morpheme both initially and finally

Roots and Stems

morphologically complex words consist of a root + one or more morpheme(s)

1. Root : a lexical content morpheme that cannot be analyzed into smaller.ex : painter , reread, conceive

• may or may not stand alone as a word.ex : read, -ceive

      2. Stem : a root morpheme + affix may or may not be a word.                           ·         painter à both a words and a stem                   
      ·         -ceive+er à only a stem

§  as we add an affix to a stem, a new stem and a new word are formed 

root:           believe

stem:          believe + able

word:          un + believe + able

root:           system

stem:          system + atic

stem:          un+ system + atic

stem:          un+ system + atic + al

word:          un+ system + atic + al + ly

References :

www.albany.edu
www.mathcs.duq.edu