Morpheme Research Paper

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. When it stands by itself, it is considered a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function e.g. the –s in cats to specify that it is plural (Kemmer, 2001). Every word comprises one or more morphemes. The more combinations

These categories are mutually exclusive, and as such, a given morpheme will belong to exactly one of them.
• Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear with other 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 accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes, examples of suffixes are: -tion, -ation, -ible, ing, etc. Bound morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes.

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional.
• Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change either the semantic meaning or part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word formed by the root

It also includes bound morphemes that are bound roots and derivational affixes.
• Function morphemes can be free morphemes that are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions. Additionally, they can be bound morphemes that are inflectional affixes
As the study aimed to find out the probable effect of explicit teaching of derivational morpheme on learners’ writing fluency achievement, we are going to focus more on derivations and its types.
2.3.2 Derivation and inflection

Derivation can be contrasted with inflection, in that derivation produces a new word (a distinct lexeme), whereas inflection produces grammatical variants of the same word. Generally speaking, inflection applies in more or less regular patterns to all members of a part of speech (for example, nearly every English verb adds -s for the third person singular present tense), while derivation follows less consistent patterns (for example, the nominalizing suffix -ity can be used with the adjectives modern and dense, but not with open or strong). However, it is important to note that derivations and inflections can share homonyms, that being, morphemes that have the same sound,