文档介绍：Chapter 3
Morphological Structure of English Words
Morpheme
Morpheme: A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. (The smallest functional unit in position of words, in view of word-formation; syntactically, a morpheme is the minimal form of grammatical analysis)
Morph: A morpheme must be realized by discrete units. These actual spoken minimal carries of meaning are morphs.
Monomorphenic words: morphemes are realized by single morphs. ., bird, tree, green, sad, want, desire. These morphemes coincide with words as they can stand by themselves and function freely in a sentence.
Allomorph: Some morphemes are realized by more than one morph. Such alternative morphs are allomorphs. ., the morpheme of plurality (-s) has a number of allomorphemes in different sound context in cats /s/, bags /z/, matches /iz/.
II. Types of morpheme
free morpheme & bound morpheme
Free morpheme: are those which usually plete meanings in themselves and can be used freely or independently as words. The morphemes plete meaning and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences, ., cat, walk. They are identical with root words, morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are considered to be free.
Bound morpheme: have to be bound with other morphemes to form words and can not be used independently as words. The morphemes cannot occur as separate words. They are bo