Morphology is the analysis of the structure of the words. It analyses the structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. All these elements are known as ‘morphemes’ which is the minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.
According to the function, the morphemes are classified into the following types. Free Morphemes, Bound Morphemes, Lexical Morphemes, Functional Morphemes, Derivational Morphemes and Inflectional Morphemes. A useful way to remember all these different types of morphemes is presented below.
Free Morphemes:
A morpheme that can stand by itself as a single word is called free morpheme. The free morphemes can generally be identified as the set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. When they are used with bound morphemes attached, the basic word forms are technically known as stems.
Bound Morphemes:
A morpheme such as un- or –ed that cannot stand alone and must be attached to another form. Bound morphemes can generally be identified as the set of separate forms such as prefixes, suffixes and affixes. The example for free morpheme and bound morpheme above shows it clearly.
Lexical Morphemes:
A free morpheme that is a content word such as a nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs known as lexical morpheme. It is easy to add new lexical morphemes to the language easily, so they are treated as an ‘open’ class of words.
e. g. man, home (noun)
break, sit (verb)
long, happy (adjective)
quickly, beautifully (adverb)
Functional Morphemes:
A free morpheme that is used as a function word, such as articles, conjunction, preposition and pronoun called functional morpheme. The functional morphemes are described as a ‘closed’ class of words.
e. g. a, the (article)
and, because (conjunction)
on, at (preposition)
he, she (pronoun)
Derivational Morphemes:
A bound morpheme such as re-, un-, -ish, -ment, used to make new words or words of a different grammatical category is called derivational morpheme. Derivational morphemes can be prefixes and suffixes.
e. g. child – childish
view – review
Inflectional Morphemes:
A bound morpheme used to indicate the grammatical function of a word is called inflectional morpheme. English has only eight inflectional morphemes, all suffixes. They are,
Two for noun: –‘s used to show possessive, -s for plural,
Four inflections used with verbs: -s, -ing, -ed, and –en
Two inflections used with adjectives: -er, -est
e. g. Jim’s sister baked biggest cake in the competition.
English PAL 
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