Bound Morpheme

A bound morpheme is a morpheme that cannot appear as a word form without attachment to another morpheme via a morphological process.

• Context:
  • It can range from being a Derivational Morpheme to being an Inflectional Morpheme.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • an Affix, such as a prefix or a suffix.
  • un-, as in ungrammatical.
  • -er, a Derivational Morpheme.
  • non-, a Derivational Morpheme.
  • -ist, a Derivational Morpheme.
  • -ed.
  • -s, a Pluralization Morpheme (i.e. an Inflectional Morpheme).
  • ex-
  • pseudo-
  • ?? -phobia ??
• Counter-Example(s):
  • ball, as in football, a Free Morpheme.
• See: Morphological Root.

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References

2009

• (WordNet, 2009) ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=bound%20morpheme
  • S: (n) bound morpheme, bound form (a morpheme that occurs only as part of a larger construction; eg an -s at the end of plural nouns)

2001

• (Hausser, 2001) ⇒ Roland Hausser. (2001). “Foundations of Computational Linguistics: Human-Computer Communication in Natural Language, 2nd edition. Springer.

1999

• (Hausser, 1999) ⇒ Ronald Hausser. (1999). “Three Principled Methods of Automatic Word Form Recognition.” In: Proceedings of VEXTAL: Venecia per il Tratamento Automatico delle Lingue.
  • QUOTE: In structuralism, the morphemes of the open and closed classes are called free morphemes, in contradistinction to bound morphemes. A morpheme is free if it can occcur as an independent word form, e.g. book. Bound morphemes, on the other hand, are affixes such as the prefixes un-, pre-, dis-, etc., and the suffixes -s, -ed, -ing, etc., which can occur only in combination with free morphemes. The following example represents the English plural morpheme, which has been claimed to arise in such different forms as book/s, wolv/es, ox/en and sheep/#.

1998

• (Carter, 1998) ⇒ Ronald Carter. (1998). “Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives; 2nd edition." Routledge.
  • QUOTE: Two observations can me made immediately. First, morphemes convey semantico-syntactic information. Secondly, there are two classes of morphemes: morphemes which occur independently as words and are co-terminous with specific word-forms, and morphemes which occur only as part of a word and which could not stand on their own. The first class, which are called free morphemes, would include cat, distinguish, laugh. The second class, which are called bound morphemes, would include un, s, ed, able, anti, and ism. We should note, however, that some morphemes can have the same form but still be different morphemes, for example, the 's' in cats, cat's and laughs or the 'er' in smaller, winner, eraser. These variants are usually termed allomorphs. We should also recognize that like the term lexeme, morpheme is an abstraction. To be strict, morphemes do not actually occur in words. Morphemes are realized by forms which are called morphs.

    … bound affixes [math]\displaystyle{ s }[/math], ible, and in ; but, by comparison, it is arguable whether the grammatical words the operates with an entirely 'freer' lexicality than each of the bound affixes.

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