Summary of Free Morpheme
1. According
to Francis Katamba free:
morphem is many words contain a root standing
on its own. Roots which are capable of standing independently. A root is the
irreducible core of a word, with absolutely nothing else attached to it. It is
the part that is always present, possibly with some modification, in the
various manifestations of a lexeme. For example, walk is a root and it
appears in the set of word-forms that instantiate the lexeme walik such
as walk, walks, walking and walked. Example of free
morphemes: man, book, tea. Single
words like those are the smallest free morphemes capable of occurring in
isolation. Many other free morphemes are function words. These differ from
lexical morphemes in that while the lexical morphemes carry most of the
'semantic content', the function words mainly (but not exclusively)
signalgrammatical information or logical relations in a sentence.
Distinguishing between lexical and grammatical morphemes is normally both
useful and straightforward. However, there are cases where this distinction is
blurred. This is because there are free morphemes (simple words) which do not
fit neatly into either category. For example, a conjunction like though
signals a logical relationship and at the same time appears to have
considerably more 'descriptive semantic content' than, say, the
article the.
2. According
to Mark Aronoff and Kirsten:
Fudeman
free morphem is consist of a
word, such as hand, or a meaningful piece of a word, such as the -ed of
looked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Another way in
which morphemes have been defined is as a pairing between sound and meaning. We
have purposely chosen not to use this definition. Some morphemes have no
concrete form or no continuous form, as we will see, and some do not have
meanings in the conventional sense of the term. For example, 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, itselfmade 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. The existence
of infixes challenges the traditional notion of a morpheme as an indivisible
unit. We want to call the stem sulat ‘write’ a morpheme, and yet the
infix -um- breaks it up. This seems to be a property of –umrather
than sulat. Our definition of morphemes as the smallest linguistic pieces with
a grammatical function survives this challenge.
3. According to Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy :
free morphem is morphemes that can stand on their own. For example,
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.
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.). 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 Clintoni) at their core. Example of free moprhemes is read, hear,
large, perform, white and dark. 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
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.
In the native Germanic portion of the vocabulary, the root of a complex word is
usually free.
