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[Jitu5]

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest unit of word having a semantic meaning. They can’t be broken down any further into recognizable or meaningful parts. A morpheme is composed by a phoneme in spoken language and a grapheme in written language. Broadly, morpheme is categorized into two classes.
(i) Free Morpheme
(ii) Bound morpheme.
A free morpheme can stand alone as an independent word in a phrase while bound morpheme depends on other morphemes to form a meaningful word. For instance, Unsuccessful – This word consists of un+ success+ ful. Here, ‘un-’ and ‘-ful’ are bound morpheme where ‘success’ is a free morpheme. ‘un-’ and ‘-ful’ are affixes.
Bound morpheme generally tend to affixes i.e. prefixes and suffixes. Moreover, the morphemes in which affix is attached is called base or stem morpheme. A base morpheme can be both i.e. free and bound morphemes. Some words are free morphemes but in contraction, it becomes bound morphemes.
For instance, I will go to school. Here, ‘will is a free morpheme.
I’ll go to school. Here, ‘ll’ is the contraction of ‘will’. But it is bound morphemes.
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Jitu5

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