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The root morpheme is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced to smaller constituents. [3] The derivational morphemes carry only derivational information. [4] The affix is composed of all inflectional morphemes, and carries only inflectional information. [5]
In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression, while a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. [1] A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, and a free morpheme is a type of free form. [2]
Surface forms of words are those found in natural language text. The corresponding lexical form of a surface form is the lemma followed by grammatical information (for example the part of speech, gender and number). In English give, gives, giving, gave and given are surface forms of the verb give. The lexical form would be "give", verb.
Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound: [4] Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse). Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un-appears only when
Bloomfield's "sign base" morpheme hypothesis: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning. Bloomfield's "lexical morpheme" hypothesis: morphemes, affixes and roots alike are stored in the lexicon. Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian [17] and one Hockettian. [18]
the relationship of lexical meaning to sentence meaning and syntax. Lexical units, also referred to as syntactic atoms, can be independent such as in the case of root words or parts of compound words or they require association with other units, as prefixes and suffixes do. The former are termed free morphemes and the latter bound morphemes. [4]
For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems. A root, or a root morpheme, in the stricter sense, may be thought of as a mono-morphemic stem. The traditional definition allows roots to be either free morphemes or bound morphemes.
Agglutinative languages have words containing several morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from one another in that each morpheme represents only one grammatical meaning and the boundaries between those morphemes are easily demarcated; that is, the bound morphemes are affixes, and they may be individually identified.