Bound Morphemes and Free Morphemes: The Difference

Bound morphemes and Free morphemes are well known categories of morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest indivisible unit of a language that is capable of harbouring meaning. Since the scope of this article is limited to the differences between bound and free morphemes, the rest part of this will be limited to the differences.

Bound Morphemes

Bound morphemes are morphemes that are incapable of expressing meaning independently. That is, they are morphemes that lack meaning when they appear in isolation. For example;

1. -ent

2. -or

3. un-

4. ir-

5. il-

6. -ant

You would notice from the examples above that none of the elements listed indicate any form of meaning hence the hyphenation of the elements. The hyphens are indicators that they are to be placed before or after words depending on whether the hyphens appear before or after the bound morphemes. By attaching these morphemes to words, they would then read:

1. Dependent

2. Extractor

3. Unreal

4. Irrelevant

5. Illogical

6. Assistant

From the examples above, it can be deduced, therefore, that bound morphemes are morphemes that only derive meaning when they are attached to other words. That is, they lack meaning in isolation but they derive meaning in association with other words. However, this is not to imply that just by adding a bound morpheme to any element at all it would be able to generate meaning. For example: Adding (un-) to (-ant) which makes *unant does not make for a meaningful realization. So bound morphemes only derive meaning when they are attached to free morphemes or words in general.

Free Morphemes

Free morphemes are morphemes that, unlike bound morphemes, are capable of expressing meaning in isolation. They do not need to be attached to any word in other to be meaningful. For example:

1. Word

2. Talk

3. Like

4. Is

5. Touch

6. Let

You would also notice that none of the words in the examples above has a hyphen before or after it and this just goes to show that they are not dependent on any word to make sense or become meaningful.

Free morphemes are said to be the direct equivalent of words. It is said that all free morphemes are words but not all words are free morphemes. This assertion will be demonstrated shortly. Take for instance;

1. Word

The example above is both a free morpheme and a word: this is because it cannot be further broken down without rendering it meaningless. For instance: wo- & -rd are meaningless in isolation. 

Now take another example;

2. Words

This second example is a word but it is not a free morpheme. How is that? Simply because of its slightly complicated compositional structure. Now, while the first example: word, has a simple composition that cannot be broken down without rendering it meaningless, the second example: words, can be further broken down and still be meaningful. For instance; word + -s, what we would then have is a free morpheme and a bound morpheme that come together to form a word.

Related Posts:

• Affixation: What you need to Know
• Derivational Morphemes and Inflectional Morphemes: The Difference 
• Morphophonemic Rules: What there is to Know