correlates with the smallest difference in word or sentence meaning or in grammatical structure 1993:24.
Fromkin also states that a morpheme is defined as the minimal linguistic sign, a grammatical unit that is an arbitrary union of sound and meaning that
cannot be further analysed, for example:
One morpheme Boy
Desire
Two morphemes Boy + ish
Desir e + able
Three morphemes Boy + ish + ness
Desir e + abil + ity
Four morphemes Gentle + men + li + ness
Un + desir e + abil + ity
More than four morphemes Un + gentle + man + li + ness Anti + dis + establish + ment
+ ari + an + ism some speakers
would perceive
several morphemes
in „establish‟.
2.3.3 Kinds of Morpheme
According to Bauer, morpheme are categorized into two parts namely, free morphemes and bound morphemes. First the words are called free morphemes
because they can stand on their own as fully fledged words, they can also be a word-form. Katamba 1993: 41 also states, many words contain a root standing
on its own. Roots which are capable of standing independently are called free morpheme. The free morpheme are lexical morphemes such as nouns, adjectives,
verbs, preposition or adverbs. For example: man, far, cook, gentle, desire, dog, hot, judge, boy, car, etc
. Second words are called bound morphemes because they can only survive
meaningfully by being attached to free morphemes e.g.-ly, -ing, -ise, -action, - less, non-, co- and so on. According to Bauer in his book entitled English Word
Formation, bound morpheme is a morpheme that can only occur in a word form in
conjunction with at last one other morph. Thus, in the word form blenders. Blend
canoccur in isolation as a word form and it is called free morpheme, while
–er and –s can only occur if they are attached to the other morph and they are called
bound morpheme Bauer, 1985: 17. We can say that all affixes prefixes and suffixes in English are bound
morphemes. The free morphemes can generally be identified as the set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. when free
morphemes are used with bound morphemes attached, the basic word form are technically known as stems.
2.3.4 Affixation: prefixes and suffixes
The process affixation in morphology can be divided into prefixation and suffixation. Quirk et al states that affixation is adding a prefix or a suffix to the
