5 Morphology and Word Formation key concepts

mission, missile, begin, and retrofit.) List five more sequences of let-
ters that are sometimes a morpheme and sometimes not.
4. Just for fun, find some other pairs like disgruntled / *gruntled and 
disgusted
/ *gusted, where one member of the pair is an actual English 
word and the other should be a word, but isn’t.
Affixes are classified according to whether they are attached before or 
after the form to which they are added. Prefixes are attached before and 
suffixes
after. The bound morphemes listed earlier are all suffixes; the {re-} 
of resaw is a prefix. Further examples of prefixes and suffixes are presented in 
Appendix A at the end of this chapter.
Root, derivational, and inflectional morphemes
Besides being bound or free, morphemes can also be classified as root, deri-
vational, or inflectional. A root morpheme is the basic form to which other 

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Delahunty and Garvey 
 
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morphemes are attached. It provides the basic meaning of the word.The 
morpheme {saw} is the root of sawers. Derivational morphemes are added 
to forms to create separate words: {-er} is a derivational suffix whose ad-
dition turns a verb into a noun, usually meaning the person or thing that 
performs the action denoted by the verb. For example, {paint}+{-er} creates 
painter, one of whose meanings is “someone who paints.”
 Inflectional
morphemes do not create separate words. They merely 
modify the word in which they occur in order to indicate grammatical prop-
erties such as plurality, as the {-s} of magazines does, or past tense, as the {ed} 
of babecued does. English has eight inflectional morphemes, which we will 
describe below.
We can regard the root of a word as the morpheme left over when all 
the derivational and inflectional morphemes have been removed. For example, 
in immovability, {im-}, {-abil}, and {-ity} are all derivational morphemes, and 
when we remove them we are left with {move}, which cannot be further di-
vided into meaningful pieces, and so must be the word’s root. 
We must distinguish between a word’s root and the forms to which af-
fixes are attached. In moveable, {-able} is attached to {move}, which we’ve 
determined is the word’s root. However, {im-} is attached to moveable, not 
to {move} (there is no word immove), but moveable is not a root. Expressions 
to which affixes are attached are called bases. While roots may be bases, 
bases are not always roots.
Exercise
1. Can an English word have more than one prefix? Give examples. More 
than one suffix? For example? More than one of each? Give examples. 
Divide the examples you collected into their root, derivational, and 
inflectional morphemes.
2. Check your dictionary to see how it deals with inflected and derived 
word forms. Does it list all the inflections of regular inflected words? 
Just irregular ones? Does it accord derived forms their own entries or 
include them in the entries of the forms from which they are derived?
3. Does your dictionary list bound morphemes? Which kinds?