Bolanle Elizabeth Arokoyo Morphology Lecture Series #III
We continue our lecture from The Morpheme.
The morpheme can broadly be divided into free morphemes and bound morphemes.
One basic feature of the morpheme is that it must be meaning bearing.
The tree diagram below shows the distribution of the morphemes.
Morpheme
Free Bound
Lex. Fun. Infl. Deriv.
- Free Morphemes
The free morpheme is a morpheme that can exist in isolation.
It is a morpheme that has independent existence. It can stand on its own.
It is the core of the word.
It is a morphological unit whose existence is not dependent on any other unit whether morphological, phonological or syntactic; it occurs unattached.
The free morpheme is a word by itself, the meaning carrying unit. The free morpheme is also the base, root and at times, the stem.
As the base, root and stem, it can accept other morphemes to be attached to it. Examples of free morphemes in Igala are:
4. atá ‘father’
ọ́ma ‘child’
íye ‘mother’
agboji ‘leader’
Free morphemes can also broadly be divided into two namely lexical and functional morphemes as discussed below.
a. Lexical Morphemes
Lexical morphemes are the meaning bearers of sentences.
They serve as carriers of the information being conveyed in a sentence.
Lexical morphemes form the open class of words as words belonging to this group are opened to word formation rules, new members of each class can easily be created. They are nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs.
Consider the following examples from English and Yoruba.
5. Noun Verb Adj Adv
man eat deep fairly
woman sleep ugly along
boy drink nice deeply
stone buy fair easily
table smile certain quietly
Yoruba
6. Noun
orúkọ ‘name’
ọkùnrin ‘man’
ilé ‘house’
ago ‘watch’
7. Verb
lọ ‘go’
tà ‘sell’
sà ‘pick’
gé ‘cut’
8. Adjective
kpukpa ‘red’
dára ‘good’
dúdú ‘black’
wúwo ‘heavy’
9. Adverb
kíákíá ‘quickly’
tètè ‘fast’
ibẹ̀‘there’
mànà ‘definitely’
b. Functional Morphemes
Functional morphemes show relationship between or among lexical morphemes.
Unlike lexical morphemes they do not convey lexical meaning and they are very few in number.
They belong to the closed class as new members are not admitted.
They have a high frequency of occurrence and they are reciprocally exclusive.
Two members of a class cannot be used together.
They include all functional words like prepositions (on, in, at, under, over, etc.), pronouns (he, she, it, they, her, us, etc.), conjunctions (and, or, but, etc.), determiners (a, an, the, these, etc.), and interjections (ah! oh!, eh!, ughh!).
Following in (10) below are examples of functional morphemes from Owé:
10.
a. àti ‘and’
b. àbí ‘or’
c. sugbọ̀n ‘but’
d. èmi ‘I’
e. àwa ‘we’
f. kan ‘one / a’
g. abẹ́‘under’
h. inú ‘inside’
Functional morphemes are however open to inflectional morphemes as they are capable of being inflected for number, person, gender and case.
This will be discussed under inflectional morphemes later.
2. Bound Morphemes
In morphology, a bound morpheme is a dependent morpheme.
It is a morpheme that cannot occur without being attached to a root.
The bound morpheme does not occur as an independent word.
It never never occurs in isolation. It is only meaningful when attached to a root.
Their major functions are to derive new words in which case they may change the grammatical class of the word and to provide additional grammatical information.
In Yorùbá, all vowels except u can serve the derivational purpose of creating nouns from verbs.
For example, the noun ẹ̀sẹ̀‘sin’ is derived from theverb sẹ̀‘to sin’ by the addition of the bound morpheme ẹ-which functions as a nominalizer here.
The same explanation obtains for the nouns ikú ‘death’ and ìfẹ́ ‘love’ derived from the verbs kú ‘to die’ and fẹ́‘to love’ respectively.
The bound morpheme in these examples is ‘i’’. The oní- ‘owner of’ morpheme in Yorùbá also derives new nouns from nouns. Oní- ‘owner of’ is attached to nouns like ilé ‘house’, igi ‘tree’, omi ‘water’, ata ‘pepper’, etc. to derive onílé ‘landlord’, onígi ‘owner of tree’, olómi ‘water seller’, and aláta ‘pepper seller’ respectively. The forms ólómi‘water seller’ and aláta ‘pepper seller’ have passed through some morpho-phonological processes which be explained later in subsequent lectures.
The bound morpheme –ed in English provides information about tense and so it is attached to verbs. It is added to words like walk – walked, smoke- smoked, kill- killed, buy-bought, hit- hit, catch- caught, etc.
The bound morpheme changed the form of the verb from present to past. Morphemes are divided into different structural types.
They include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, and suprafixes. All these bound morphemes are regarded as affixes.
Bound morphemes perform two basic functions; derivational and inflectional.
They are referred to as derivational morphemes (Derivational Morphemes) and inflectional morphemes (Inflectional Morphology) respectively. These will be discussed in subsequent lectures.
Exercises
- With ample illustrations, classify the morpheme.
- Describe free and bound morphemes.
- Be creative! What are the possible forms you can come up with using affixes like un-, in-, dis-, il-, -s, -ren, -ed, on these words. Can you explain why the derived or inflected forms sound the way they do?
List of abbreviations
Adj. Adjective
Adv. Adverb
Deriv. Derivational
Func. Functional
Infl. Inflectional
Lex. Lexical
NB
Excepts are taken from Arokoyo (2017)
References
Arokoyo, Bolanle Elizabeth. (2017). Unlocking morphology. Ilorin: Chridamel Publishing House.