bound morpheme

Subject : Morphology

Bound Morpheme

1.      According to Andrew carstairs-McCarthy :

A bound morpheme is a morpheme (or word element) that cannot stand a lone as a word, bound morphemes include prefixes and suffixes. Attaching a bound morpheme to a free morpheme (for example, adding the prefix re- to the verb start) created n word or at least a new form a word(in the example, restart). Morphemes are represented in sound and writing by morphs. There are two main types ofbound morphemes: derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes

Kinds of morpheme: bound versus free

The morphemes in the word helpfulness, just discussed, do not all have the

same status. Help, -ful and -ness are not simply strung together like beads

on a string. Rather, the core, or starting-point, for the formation of this word is help; the morpheme -ful is then added to form helpful, which in turn is the basis for the formation of helpfulness. In using the word ‘then’

here, I am not referring to the historical sequence in which the words help, helpful and helpfulness came into use; I am talking rather about the structure of the word in contemporary English – a structure that is part of the implicit linguistic knowledge of all English speakers, whether or not they know anything about the history of the English language.

There are two reasons for calling help the core of this word. One is that help supplies the most precise and concrete element in its meaning,

shared by a family of related words like helper, helpless, helplessness and

unhelpful that differ from one another in more abstract ways. (This is an aspect of word structure that we will look at in more detail). Another reason is that, of the three morphemes in helpfulness, only help can stand on its own – that is, only help can, in an appropriate context, constitute an utterance by itself. That is clearly not true of -ness, nor is it true of -ful. (Historically -ful is indeed related to the word full, but their divergence in modern English is evident if one compares words like helpful and cheerful with other words that really do contain full, such as half-full and chock-full.) In self-explanatory fashion, morphemes that can stand on their own are called free, and ones that cannot are bound. A salient characteristic of English – a respect in which English differs from many other languages – is that a high proportion of complex words are like helpfulness and un-Clintonish in that they have a free morpheme (like help and Clinton) at their core. Compare the two column of words listed all of which consist uncontroversially of two morphemes, separated by a hyphen:

read-able b. leg-ible

hear-ing audi-ence

en-large magn-ify

perform-ance rend-ition

white-ness clar-ity

dark-en obfusc-ate

seek-er applic-ant

The rationale for the division is that the words in column a. all contain a free morpheme, respectively read, hear, large, perform, white and dark. By contrast, in the words in column b., though they are similar in meaning to their counterparts in a., both the morphemes are bound. If you knows something about the history of the English language, or if you know Spanish or Latin, you may know already that most of the free morphemes belong to that part of the vocabulary of English that has been inherited directly through the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family to which English belongs, whereas all the morphemes have been introduced, or borrowed, from Latin, either directly or via French. We will return to these historical matters in Chapter 9. Even without such historical knowledge, it may strike you that the words are on the whole somewhat less common, or more bookish, This reflects the fact that, among the most widely used words, the Germanic element still predominates. It is thus fair to say that, in English, there is still a strong tendency for complex words to contain a free morpheme at their core. Is it possible for a bound morpheme to be so limited in its distribution that it occurs in just one complex word? The answer is yes. This is almost true, for example, of the morpheme leg- ‘read’ in legible at least in everyday vocabulary, it is found in only one other word, namely illegible, the negative counterpart of legible. And it is absolutely true of the morphemes cran-, huckle- and gorm- in cranberry, huckleberry and gormless. Cranberry and huckleberry are compounds  kind of complex word to be discussed whose second element is clearly the free morpheme berry, occurring in several other compounds such as strawberry, blackberry and blueberry; however, cran- and huckle- occur nowhere outside these compounds. A name commonly given to such bound .

2.      According to Francis Katamba (1993) :

Bound Morpheme is the roots that incapable of occurring in isolation. They always occur with some other word-building element attached to them. Such roots are called bound morphemes. Examples of bound morphemes are given below:

a. –mit in permit, remit, commit, admit

b. –ceive as in perceive, receive, conceive

c.  predd-. as in predator, predatory, predation, depredate

d.sedas- as in sedan, sedate, sedent, sedentary, sediment

The bound roots -mit, -ceive, -pred and sed- co-occur with forms like dee, re-, -ate, -ment which recur in numerous other words as prefixes or suffixes. None of these roots could occur as an independent word. Roots tend to have a core meaning which is in some way modified by the affix. But determining meaning is sometimes tricky. Perhaps you are able to recognise the meaning 'prey' that runs through the root pred- in the various words and perhaps you are also able to identify the meaning 'sit' in all the forms in which contain sed.

3.      According to Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman(2011):

The appearance of one morph over another in this case isdetermined by voicing and the place of articulation of the final consonant of the verb stem. Now consider the word reconsideration. We can break it into three morphemes: re-, consider, and -ation. Consider is called the stem. A stem is a base unit to which another morphological piece is attached. The stem can be simple, made up of only one part, or complex, itself made up of more than one piece. Here it is best to consider consider a simple stem.

Although it consists historically of more than one part, most present-day speakers would treat it as an unanalyzable form. We could also call consider the root. A root is like a stem in constituting the core of the word to which other pieces attach, but the term refers only to morphologically simple units. For example, disagree is the stem disagreement, because it is the base to which -ment attaches, but agree is the root. Taking disagree now, agree is both the stem to which dis- attaches and the root of the entire word. Returning now to reconsideration, re- and -ation are both affixes, which means that they are attached to the stem. Affixes like re- that go before the stem are prefixes, and those like -ation that go after are suffixes. Some readers may wonder why we have not broken -ation down further into two pieces, -ate and -ion, which function independently elsewhere. In this particular word they do not do so (cf. *reconsiderate), and hence we treat -ation as a single morpheme. It is important to take seriously the idea that the grammatical function of a morpheme, which may include its meaning, must be constant.