The part of linguistics that deals with the study of the structure of words is called morphology or morphemics.
Morpheme can be define as the smallest meaningful unit in the structure of a language. The smallest meaningful unit means a unit which cannot be divided further without destroying or altering the meaning.
Morpheme is the smallest meaningful grammatical unit of a language that can't be further divided.
Simply, It has a meaning or grammatical function. A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes.
The word ' write' is a morpheme
The word 'Rewrite' has two morphemes.
Re = Grammatical Function
Write = Gives meaning.
One Morpheme Two Morpheme
Sad sadness
Happy Unhappy
Book Books
Mad Madness
Man Manly
There are two types of morpheme in language.
*Free Morpheme
*Bound Morpheme
Free morpheme can exists alone with a specific meaning. They can stand alone as an independent words. For example book day, height, eat...etc. It is the base or root word.
Bound Morpheme
Bound morpheme can't stand alone. It cannot occure independently. They don't make any senes when used in isolation. They are always attached to other morpheme.
Eg: ed, es, s, dis, ing, in, un, ful, ness.. ect.
Lexical Morpheme and Grammatical Morpheme
Those morphemes which have more or less independent meaning are called Lexical morphemes
For eg: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Grammatical morphemes are grammatically significant but semantically insignificant. They Includes articles, prepositions, conjections.
The boy is cutting mango with knife.
The, is, ing, with = Grammatical Morphemes
Boy, cut, mango, knife = Lexical Morpheme
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