Morphemes and their types

Free and Bound Morphemes
There are two types of morphemes-free morphemes and bound morphemes. "Free morphemes" can stand alone with a specific meaning, for example, eat, date, weak. "Bound morphemes" cannot stand alone with meaning. Morphemes are comprised of two separate classes called (a) bases (or roots) and (b) affixes.
A "base," or "root" is a morpheme in a word that gives the word its principle meaning. An example of a "free base" morpheme is woman in the word womanly. An example of a "bound base" morpheme is -sent in the word dissent.
Affixes
An "affix" is a bound morpheme that occurs before or after a base. An affix that comes before a base is called a "prefix." Some examples of prefixes are ante-, pre-, un-, and dis-, as in the following words:
antedate
prehistoric
unhealthy
disregard
An affix that comes after a base is called a "suffix." Some examples of suffixes are -ly, -er, -ism, and -ness, as in the following words:
happily
gardener
capitalism
kindness
Derivational Affixes
An affix can be either derivational or inflectional. "Derivational affixes" serve to alter the meaning of a word by building on a base. In the examples of words with prefixes and suffixes above, the addition of the prefix un- to healthy alters the meaning of healthy. The resulting word means "not healthy." The addition of the suffix -er to garden changes the meaning of garden, which is a place where plants, flowers, etc., grow, to a word that refers to 'a person who tends a garden.' It should be noted that all prefixes in English are derivational. However, suffixes may be either derivational or inflectional.
Inflectional Affixes
There are a large number of derivational affixes in English. In contrast, there are only eight "inflectional affixes" in English, and these are all suffixes. English has the following inflectional suffixes, which serve a variety of grammatical functions when added to specific types of words. These grammatical functions are shown to the right of each suffix.
-s noun plural
-'s noun possessive
-s verb present tense third person singular
-ing verb present participle/gerund
-ed verb simple past tense
-en verb past perfect participle
-er adjective comparative
-est adjective superlative
We saw in our last units that words can be made up of morphemes, which are the smallest linguistic unit that links form with meaning. Morphemes can do a couple of quite different jobs in a word.
Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that add grammatical information to a word. When a word is inflected, it still retains its core meaning, and its category stays the same. We’ve actually already talked about several different inflectional morphemes:
The number on a noun is inflectional morphology. For most English nouns the inflectional morpheme for the plural is an –s or –es (e.g., books, cars, dishes) that gets added to the singular form of the noun, but there are also a few words with irregular plural morphemes. Some languages also have a special morpheme for the dual number, to indicate exactly two of something. Here’s an example from Manam, one of the many languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. You can see that there’s a morpheme on the noun woman that indicates dual, for exactly two women, and a different morpheme for plural, that is, more than two women.

Manam (Papua New Guinea)
/áine ŋara/	that woman	singular
/áine ŋaradiaru/	those two women	dual
/áine ŋaradi/	those women	plural

The tense on a verb is also inflectional morphology. For many English verbs, the past tense is spelled with an –ed, (walked, cooked, climbed) but there are also many English verbs where the tense inflection is indicated with a change in the vowel of the verb (sang, wrote, ate). English does not have a bound morpheme that indicates future tense, but many languages do.
Another kind of inflectional morphology is agreement on verbs. If you’ve learned French or Spanish or Italian, you know that the suffix at the end of a verb changes depending on who the subject of the verb is. That’s agreement inflection. Here are some examples from French. You can see that there’s a different morpheme on the end of each verb depending on who’s doing the singing.

French
1st	je chante	I sing
2d	tu chantes	you sing
3d	elle chante	she sings
1st	nous chantons	we sing
2d	vous chantez	you (pl.) sing
3d	elles chantent	they sing

And in some languages, the morphology on a noun changes depending on the noun’s role in a sentence; this is called case inflection. Take a look at these two sentences in German: The first one, Der Junge sieht Sofia, means that, “The boy sees Sofia”. Look at the form of the phrase, the boy, “der Junge”. Now, look at this other sentence, Sofia sieht den Jungen, which means that “Sofia sees the boy”. In the first sentence, the boy is doing the seeing, but in the second, the boy is getting seen, and the word for boy, Junge has a different morpheme on it to indicate its different role in the sentence. That’s an example of case morphology, which is another kind of inflection.

A word is a sequence of morphemes (in the simplest case, one morpheme), within which no other morpheme sequence of the same morpheme can be inserted.
A word is the minimal unit of language possessing positional independence, capable of syntactic functioning and the largest unit of morphology.
Some clarification should be made to the term "word", namely, the word is a generalized representative of all word forms in which it may appear.
With respect to words the following points should be put forward, which are in many respects similar to those put forward above with respect to morphemes:
a) In any utterance, any morpheme or sequence of morphemes is always included in a word (i.e. there are no morphemes that are not included in any word).
b) Every morpheme in an utterance is included in one word only (i.e., no morpheme can be included in two adjacent words simultaneously).
c) As a consequence of the above mentioned in point "a", if one part of a construction is recognized as a word, then the remaining part of it should also be recognized as a word or a group of words. And vice versa, if any part of the construction is not recognized as a word, the remaining part of it also cannot be recognized as a word. For example, if we consider the first part - give up to be a word, then it follows that the second part - up - is also a word. Conversely, if we believe that up is not a word in this construction, then it inevitably follows that give is not a word here either. (This clearly contradicts the definition of a word, because words and groups of words can be inserted between give and up; cf. He gave it up; etc.)
More often than not, a word consists of more than one morpheme, and usually such morphemes are qualitatively heterogeneous. The most typical case is when a word consists of one free morpheme and one or more linked morphemes. A free morpheme may be used independently, as a separate word, unaccompanied by other morphemes, a linked morpheme is always used as part of a word and cannot be a separate word. Thus, in the word "unlucky" /ən/ + /lək/ + /i/, the second morpheme can be used as a separate word, the first and third are not used as separate words. These morphemes are called affixes, which are divided into prefixes and suffixes.
Affix morphemes are used as a means of constructing new words, i.e. they are the main agents of word formation, thus they participate in the process of changing the morphology of the English language.
Word-affixes are morphemes used as a means of word formation and are not indicators of grammatical relations between words.
For example, in the sentence My friend lives in London the morpheme /əs/ in the word princess is word-forming. [3, c. 28]
Thus, affixation - a way of forming new words by attaching word-forming affixes to the word base. Affixations, with the help of which a relatively large number of new formations are created, are called productive. Such suffixes in modern English are suffixes -ing, -y, -ee, -ist, -piece, etc., prefixes anti-, super-, pro-, mis-, pan-, pre-, etc. [8, p. 9] For example: My sitting-room has s three-pieces suite and a desk. Party organizations inevitably prejudge proposals from their opponents.