By desmond bett; B. A- criminology m. A – public administration & policy

3.4
FREEDOM AND BONDAGE
When we classify morphemes in terms of where they are allowed to appear, we find that they fall into two major groupings. Some morphemes are capable of occurring on their own as words, while other morphemes are only allowed to occur in combination with some other morpheme(s) but they cannot be used by themselves as independent words.
Those morphemes that are allowed to occur on their own in sentences as words are called FREE MORPHEMES while those morphemes that must occur in the company of some other morphemes are called BOUND MORPHEMES. In [3.12] the bound morphemes are italicized.
[3.12]
Pest pest(i)-cide
modern post-modern-ist
child child-ish
pack pre-pack-ed
laugh laugh-ing

The free morphemes in [3.12] can all be manipulated by syntactic rules: they can stand on their own as words. By contrast, it is impossible to use the forms –cide, post, -ist, pre-, -ed or –ing, Independently.

So far, all the examples of free morphemes that function as roots that have encounterd have been content words (see p. 14). However, not all free morphemes are content words. Some are employed to indicate grammatical functions and logical relationship rather than to convey lexical or cognitive meaning in a sentence. Hence such words are called FUNCTION WORDS. They include words such as the following:

[3.13]
articles: alan, the

Demonstratives: e.g. this, that, these and those
Pronouns: e.g. I, you, we, they, my, your, his, hers, who e.tc
Prepositions: e.g. in, into, on, to, at, on etc.
conjunctions: e.g. and, or, but, because, if etc.

In ordinary language use such words are extremely common. But on their own they would not convey a lot of information. If you receive a telegram like But it my on to the in you might suspect that the sender either had a strange sense of humor or was not mentally sound.