GES 111: The Morphemes in English

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering English morphemes, including classifications of free and bound morphemes, affixes, and word derivation processes.

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful grammatical unit in a language, representing a language's smallest unit of meaning or grammatical function.

Morph

A word segment that represents a single morpheme in writing and sound.

Free Morphemes

Morphemes that can stand alone by themselves as single words and cannot be further divided into additional word components.

Bound Morphemes

Word segments that cannot stand alone and must be joined to another or other morphemes in order to function or make a word.

Lexical Morphemes

Free morphemes that carry content meaning on their own when they appear in isolation, such as "follow," "act," "book," "run," and "dog."

Functional Morphemes

Free morphemes that serve a grammatical purpose in sentences but do not carry content meaning when they appear in isolation, such as "but," "and," and "in."

Inflectional Morphemes

Bound morphemes from a closed set of eight that alter root words to indicate quantity, person, gender, or tense while maintaining the base word's grammatical class.

Derivational Morphemes

Bound morphemes (prefixes or suffixes) that derive new words by altering the meaning, the part of speech, or both, producing a new dictionary entry.

Derivation

The process of creating new words by adding prefixes and suffixes to preexisting words and bases.

Loanword

A word borrowed from one language and incorporated into another that usually has no translation, retaining its general form and meaning in the new language.

Affixes

Tiny word elements or fragments appended to a root word to alter its meaning or grammatical characteristics, classified into prefixes, infixes, and suffixes.

Root Word

The simplest form of a word that cannot be further broken down into meaningful parts and is listed first in the dictionary.

Prefix

An affix added to the beginning or start of a word to alter its meaning, such as "un-" in "undo."

Suffix

An affix added to the end of a word to alter its function or meaning, such as "-ed" in "played."