M. Iriskulov, A. Kuldashev a course in Theoretical English Grammar Tashkent 2008

The Types of Morphemes 
 
Morphemes can be classified from different view-points: 
1. functional 
2. number correlation between form and content 
From the point of view of function they may be lexical and grammatical. The 
lexical morphemes are those that express full lexical meaning of their own and are 
associated with some object, quality, action, number of reality, like: lip, red, go, one and 
so on. The lexical morphemes can be subdivided into lexical - free and lexical - bound 
morphemes. The examples given above are free ones; they are used in speech 
independently. The lexical-bound ones are never used independently; they are usually 
added to some lexical-free morphemes to build new words like- friend-ship, free-dom, 
teach-er, spoon-ful and so on. Taking into account that in form they resemble the 
grammatical inflections they may be also called lexical - grammatical morphemes. Thus 
lexical - bound morphemes are those that determine lexical meanings of words but 
resemble grammatical morphemes in their dependence on lexical - free morphemes. The 
lexical - bound morphemes are means to build new words. 
The grammatical morphemes are those that are used either to connect words in 
sentences or to form new grammatical forms of words. The content of such morphemes 
are connected with the world of reality only indirectly therefore they are also called 
structural morphemes, e.g., shall, will, be, have, is, - (e)s, -(e)d and so on. As it is seen 
from the examples the grammatical morphemes have also two subtypes: grammatical - 
free and grammatical - bound. The grammatical - free ones are used in sentences 

---

19 
independently (I shall go) while grammatical - bound ones are usually attached to some 
lexical - free morphemes to express new grammatical form, like: girl's bag, bigger 
room, asked. 
From the point of view of number correlation between form and content there 
may be overt, zero, empty and discontinuous morphemes. 
By overt morpheme the linguists understand morphemes that are represented by 
both form and content like: eye, bell, big and so on. 
Zero morphemes are those that have (meaning) content but do not have explicitly 
expressed forms. These morphemes are revealed by means of comparison: 
ask – asks 
high -higher 
In these words the second forms are marked: "asks" is a verb in the third person 
singular which is expressed by the inflection "s". In its counterpart there's no marker 
like "s" but the absence of the marker also has grammatical meaning: it means that the 
verb "ask" is not in the third person, singular number. Such morphemes are called 
"zero". In the second example the adjective "higher" is in the comparative degree, 
because of the "- er" while its counterpart "high" is in the positive degree, the absence of 
the marker expresses a grammatical meaning, i.e. a zero marker is also meaningful, 
therefore it's a zero morpheme. 
There are cases when there's a marker which has not a concrete meaning, i.e. 
there's neither lexical nor grammatical meaning like: statesman. The word consists of 
three morphemes: state - s - man. The first and third morphemes have certain meanings. 
But "s" has no meaning though serve as a connector: it links the first morpheme with the 
third one. Such morphemes are called empty. Thus empty morphemes are those that 
have form but no content. 
In contemporary English there are cases when two forms express one meaning 
like: 
He is writing a letter 
Two morphemes in this sentence "is" and " - ing" express one meaning: a 
continuous action. Such morphemes are called discontinuous. 
Thus there are two approaches to classify morphemes: functional and number 
correlation between form and content. 
The first one can be shown in the following scheme: 
Morphemes 
lexical
grammatical 
free
bound
free
bound 
The second one can also be shown in the same way: 
Morphemes 
overt
zero 
empty 
discontinuous 

---

20 
form 
+ 
- 
+ 
+- 
meaning 
+ 
+ 
- 
+