linguistics Linguistics is the science, 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 ...

, a bound morpheme is a

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone 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

Affixes 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 prefixes or suffixes: ''pre-'' in "precaution" and ''-ment'' in "shipment". Affixes may be inflectional, 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 Compound may refer to: Architecture and built environments * Compound (enclosure), a cluster of buildings having a shared purpose, usually inside a fence or wall ** Compound (fortification), a version of the above fortified with defensive struc ...

words.

Cranberry morpheme In morphology (linguistics), linguistic morphology a cranberry morpheme (also called unique morpheme or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an ''independent'' meaning and grammatical function, but nonetheless serves ...

s 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 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 the power of the ...

"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 Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

; 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 ''kanj ...

because of the largely

morphosyllabic A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form ...

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 morpheme 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' ...

s 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 An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken 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 contrast, a language that uses a substantial number of bound morphemes to express grammatical relationships is a synthetic language.

References

{{reflist

Morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are ...

Occurrence in isolation

Roots and affixes

Word formation

Analytic and synthetic languages

See also

References