Chapter 4: Morphology

 
 
4.2 Morphemes and other morphological building-blocks 
As has been pointed out above, morphemes are defined as smallest meaning-bearing units. 
Morphemes can be classified in various ways. One common classification you have 
already learnt about above separates those morphemes that mark the grammatical forms of 
words (-s, -ed, -ing and others) from those that form new lexemes conveying new 
meanings, e.g. un- and -ment. The former morphemes are inflectional morphemes and 
form a key part of grammar, the latter are derivational morphemes and play a role in 
word-formation, as we have seen. The following criteria help you to distinguish the two 
types: 

Effect: Inflectional morphemes encode grammatical categories and relations, thus 
marking word-forms, while derivational morphemes create new lexemes.

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4 

Position: Derivational morphemes are closer to the stem than inflectional 
morphemes, cf. amendments (amend
stem
– ment
derivational
– s
inflectional
) and legalized 
(legal
stem
– ize
derivational
– ed 
inflectional
). 

Productivity: Inflectional morphemes are highly productive, which means that they 
can be attached to the vast majority of the members of a given class (say, verbs, 
nouns or adjectives), whereas derivational morphemes tend to be more restricted 
with regard to their scope of application. For example, the past morpheme can in 
principle be attached to all verbs; suffixation by means of the adjective-forming 
derivational morpheme -able, however, is largely restricted to dynamic transitive 
verbs, which excludes formations such as *bleedable or *lieable.

Class properties: Inflectional morphemes make up a closed and fairly stable class 
of items which can be listed exhaustively, while derivational morphemes tend to 
be much more numerable and more open to changes in their inventory. 
Both inflectional and derivational morphemes must be attached to other morphemes; they 
cannot occur by themselves, in isolation, and are therefore known as bound morphemes.