In the last chapter, we dealt with phonology which is about how sounds are patterned together. In this unit, we will look at the internal structure of a word, so called 'morphology'. While each sound, which we have known as 'phoneme' does not carry 'meaning' until a set of them is combined into words, a 'morpheme' which can be defined as 'the smallest meaning unit in a word does. Consider the word 'international' This word consists of three meaningful unit which cannot be broken down further, namely 'inter' , 'nation' and -al'.

Classification of morphemes: we can categorize morphemes into 'lexical morphemes' and grammatical morphemes. Lexical morphemes, i.e. nouns, verbs and adjectives have meanings in themselves whereas grammatical morphemes, i.e, determiners (the, this, etc), prepositions, conjunctions, etc usually show a relationship between lexical morphemes.

Some morphemes can stand alone, but some can't. 'Boy' is called 'free morpheme' because it can appear anywhere without depending on any other morphemes. However '-s suffix' which expresses plurality can't. It is therefore called 'bound morpheme'. Bound morphemes can be added either to the beginning of a lexical morpheme, or at the end of a word. The more familiar terms for bound morphemes is 'affixes'.

Up to this point, don't get confused that lexical morphemes and free morphemes are the same because it is not always the case. Actually both lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes have in them the subset of free morphemes and bound morphemes. Consider the following example:

Disappointed lexical morpheme/free morpheme (disappoint)+bound (-ed) morpheme
player lexical morpheme/free (play) +bound (-er) morpheme

after grammatical morpheme/free morpheme
afterwards grammatical morpheme/free (after)+bound (-wards) morpheme

Bound morphemes can be further classified into:

1. Inflectional morphemes: in English there are only eight inflectional morphemes:
1. 1 Affix that indicates plural* {PLU} is attached to the 'noun' root: girls.
1.2 Affix that indicates possessive {POSS} is attached to the 'noun' root: girl' s.
1.3 Affix that indicates comparative {COMP} is attached to the 'adjective' root: smaller.
1.4 Affix that indicates superlative {SUP} is attached to the 'adjective' root: smallest.
1.5 Affix that indicates present tense {PRES} is attached to the 'verb' root: talks.
1.6 Affix that indicates past tense* {PAST} is attached to the 'verb' root: talked.
1.7 Affix that indicates past participle* {PAST PART} is attached to the 'verb' root:driven.
1.8 Affix that indicates present participle {PRES PART} is attached to the 'verb' root: driving.

*Affixes that mark plurality include -s, -es, -en as in 'children', and zero morphemes {...}. The zero morphemes contain no inflectional form but represent syntactic meaning. Look at the following examples:

• CBS will launch a new comedy series starred by Sarah Jessica Parker, well-known for her columnist role in Sex and the City, HBO's big hit series.
(series: _______________)
• CBS always come up with new series around this time of year.
(series: __________)