Morphology may be defined as the study of the production of tokens with the help of morphemes. A morpheme is the basic unit of language carrying meaning. There are two types of morpheme: stems and affixes (suffixes, prefixes, infixes, and circumfixes).
Stems are also referred to as free morphemes, since they can even exist without adding affixes. Affixes are referred to as bound morphemes, since they cannot exist in a free form and they always exist along with free morphemes. Consider the word unbelievable
. Here, believe
is a stem or a free morpheme. It can exist on its own. The morphemes un
and able
are affixes or bound morphemes. They cannot exist in a free form, but they exist together with stem. There are three kinds of language, namely isolating languages, agglutinative languages, and inflecting languages. Morphology has a different meaning in all these languages. Isolating languages are those languages in which words are merely free morphemes and they do not carry...