Provides the fundamental semantic content of a word

Functional morphemes
Functional (or grammatical) morphemes are mostly words that have a functional purpose, such as linking or referencing lexical words. Functional morphemes include prepositions, conjunctions, articles and pronouns. Examples of functional morphemes include:

• 
  and
  
• 
  but
  
• 
  when
  
• 
  because
  
• 
  on
  
• 
  near
  
• 
  above
  
• 
  in
  
• 
  the
  
• 
  that
  
• 
  it
  
• 
  them.
  

We can rarely add new functional morphemes to the language, so we call this a 'closed' class of words.
Allomorphs.Allomorphs are a variant of morphemes. An allomorph is a unit of meaning that can change its sound and spelling but doesn't change its meaning and function.
In English, the indefinite article morpheme has two allomorphs. Its two forms are 'a' and 'an'. If the indefinite article precedes a word beginning with a constant sound it is 'a', and if it precedes a word beginning with a vowel sound, it is 'an'.
Answer the question.

1. What is a morpheme?

2. What is the difference between a morpheme, a word and an intermediary morpheme-like functional word?
3. What is a field approach?
4. What is a morph?
5. What kind of morphs are called allomorphs?
6. What is the difference between lexical and grammatical affixes?
7. Which of the two, suffixes or prefixes, can be only lexical in the English language?
8. What kind of grammatical suffixes are called homonymous?
9. What are outer and inner inflexions?
10. What is the difference between full and partial suppletivity?
11. What does IC-analysis stand for?
12. What does distributional analysis aim at?
13. When are the morphs said to be in contrastive, non-contrastive and complementary distribution?
14. What are the distributional classes of morphemes?


Test.

1.What is morphology?

A. The study of the rules governing the sounds that form words.
B. The study of the rules governing sentence formation.
C. The study of the rules governing word formation.
D. The study of the rules governing the relationship between word and social aspects.
2. Which is not an example of "allomorph"?
A. The plural morpheme in English (-s, -es, en).
B. The negative morphemes in English (un-, im-, il-, in-).
C. Some derivational morphemes in English (-ment, ly, -able).
3. What is a morpheme?
A. The smallest unit of a particular language.
B. The minimal pair of a chosen phrase.
C. The smallest meaningful unit of a word.
D. The minimal item of a linguistic unit.