linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

, a bound morpheme is a

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

(the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, and a free morpheme is a type of free form.

Occurrence in isolation

A form is a free form if it can occur in isolation as a complete utterance, e.g. ''Johnny is running'', or ''Johnny'', or ''running'' (this can occur as the answer to a question such as ''What is he doing?''). A form that cannot occur in isolation is a bound form, e.g. ''-y'', ''is'', and ''-ing'' (in ''Johnny is running''). Non-occurrence in isolation is given as the primary criterion for boundness in most linguistics textbooks.

Roots and affixes

Affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...

es are bound by definition.

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...

affixes are almost exclusively

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. Particul ...

es or

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carr ...

es: ''pre-'' in "precaution" and ''-ment'' in "shipment". Affixes may be

inflectional In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definit ...

, indicating how a certain word relates to other words in a larger phrase, or derivational, changing either the

part of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are as ...

or the actual meaning of a word. Most

root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the su ...

s in English are free morphemes (e.g. ''examin-'' in ''examination'', which can occur in isolation: ''examine''), but others are bound (e.g. ''socio-'' in ''sociology''). Words like ''chairman'' that contain two free morphemes (''chair'' and ''man'') are referred to as compound words. Cranberry morphemes are a special form of bound morpheme whose independent meaning has been displaced and serves only to distinguish one word from another, like in ''cranberry,'' in which the free morpheme ''berry'' is preceded by the bound morpheme ''cran-,'' meaning "crane" from the earlier name for the berry, "crane berry". An empty morpheme is a special type of bound morpheme with no inherent meaning. Empty morphemes change the phonetics of a word but offer no semantic value to the word as a whole. Examples:

Word formation

Words can be formed purely from bound morphemes, as in English ''permit,'' ultimately from

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

"through" + "I send", where ''per-'' and ''-mit'' are bound morphemes in English. However, they are often thought of as simply a single morpheme. A similar example is given in Chinese; most of its morphemes are monosyllabic and identified with a

Chinese character Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...

because of the largely morphosyllabic script, but disyllabic words exist that cannot be analyzed into independent morphemes, such as 蝴蝶 ''húdié'' 'butterfly'. Then, the individual syllables and corresponding characters are used only in that word, and while they can be interpreted as bound morphemes 蝴 ''hú-'' and 蝶 ''-dié,'' it is more commonly considered a single disyllabic morpheme. See polysyllabic Chinese morphemes for further discussion. Linguists usually distinguish between

productive Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...

and unproductive forms when speaking about morphemes. For example, the morpheme ''ten-'' in ''tenant'' was originally derived from the Latin word , "to hold", and the same basic meaning is seen in such words as "tenable" and "intention." But as ''ten-'' is not used in English to form new words, most linguists would not consider it to be a morpheme at all.

Analytic and synthetic languages

A language with a very low ratio of morphemes to words is an isolating language. Because such a language uses few bound morphemes, it expresses most grammatical relationships by

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

or helper words, so it is an

analytic language In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of ''helper'' words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing th ...

. In contrast, a language that uses a substantial number of bound morphemes to express grammatical relationships is a

synthetic language A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combi ...

References

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Morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

Occurrence in isolation

Roots and affixes

Word formation

Analytic and synthetic languages

See also

References