Two Types of Morpheme(语素)

Two Types of Morpheme

The stem morpheme is used to the smallest, indivisible units of semantic content. And there are two types of morpheme, one called free morpheme, the other named bound morpheme.

Free morphemes are capable of standing independently. Both lexical morphemes and functional morphemes are belongs to free morphemes.

Lexical morphemes are nouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions or adverbs. Lexical morphemes always (1) referring to individual, such as the nouns boy, desk, chair, Lucy and so on; (2)attributing properties, such as the adjectives cruel, good, bad, foolish and so on; (3)describing actions, process or states, such as the verbs walk, read, sing, dance and so on;

(4)expressing relations, such as the prepositions out, before, beyond, after and so on; (5)describing circumstances like manner, such as hurriedly, slowly, loudly, insanely and so on.

Unlike lexical morphemes, function morphemes mainly signal grammatical information or logical relations in a sentence. Function morphemes often include the following: (1)articles, such as the, a, an;

(2)demonstratives, such as this, that, these, those; (3)conjunctions, such as but, and, or, yet and so on; (4)pronouns, such as I, you, we, them and so on.

Bound morphemes cannot normally stand alone, but function only

as parts of words. There are two types of bound morphemes: derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes.

There are two ways for derivational morphemes to form mew words. One is changing the meaning of the stem to which they are attached. For example, ○1active and inactive, both of them are adjectives but with opposite meanings; ○2collect and recollect, both of them are verbs but one means get or gather together and the other means recall knowledge from memory; ○3light and lighter,both of them are nouns but the former means any device serving as a source of illumination, and the latter means a device for lighting or igniting fuel or charges or fires. The other is changing the word-class the stem belongs to. For example, the addition of inter- to the noun school produces the adjective interschool; the addition of en- to the adjective danger produces the verb endanger; the addition of –ment to the verb move produces the noun movement.

Instead of changing the meanings or word-class of a word, inflectional morphemes are only able to modify the form of a word so that it can fit into a particular syntactic slot. For example, the –s ending to the noun room which produces rooms only means plural; the –ing ending to the verb speak which produces speaking only means progressive; the –est ending to the adjective short which produces shortest only means superlative degree.