Kinds of morpheme: bound versus free

The morphemes in the word helpfulness, just discussed, do not all have the same status. Help, -ful and -ness are not simply strung together like beads on a string. Rather, the core, or starting-point, for the formation of this word is help; the morpheme -ful is then added to form helpful, which in turn is the basis for the formation of helpfulness. In using the word ‘then’ here, I am not referring to the historical sequence in which the words help, helpful and helpfulness came into use; I am talking rather about the structure of the word in contemporary English – a structure that is part of the implicit linguistic knowledge of all English speakers, whether or not they know anything about the history of the English language.

There are two reasons for calling help the core of this word. One is that help supplies the most precise and concrete element in its meaning, shared by a family of related words like helper, helpless, helplessness and unhelpful that differ from one another in more abstract ways. Another reason is that, of the three morphemes in helpfulness, only help can stand on its own – that is, only help can, in an appropriate context, constitute an utterance by itself. That is clearly not true of -ness, nor is it true of -ful. (Historically -ful is indeed related to the word full, but their divergence in modern English is evident if one compares words like helpful and cheerful with other words that really do contain full, such as half-full and chock-full.) In self-explanatory fashion, morphemes that can stand on their own are called free, and ones that cannot are bound. A salient characteristic of English – a respect in which English differs from many other languages – is that a high proportion of complex words are like helpfulness and un-Clintonish in that they have a free morpheme (like help and Clinton) at their core. Compare the two column of words listed at (1), all of which consist uncontroversially of two morphemes, separated by a hyphen:

(1) a. read-able b. leg-ible

hear-ing audi-ence

en-large magn-ify

perform-ance rend-ition

white-ness clar-ity

dark-en obfusc-ate

seek-er applic-ant

The rationale for the division is that the words in column a. all contain a free morpheme, respectively read, hear, large, perform, white and dark. By contrast, in the words in column b., though they are similar in meaning to their counterparts in a., both the morphemes are bound. If you know something about the history of the English language, or if you know some French, Spanish or Latin, you may know already that most of the free morphemes in (1a) belong to that part of the vocabulary of English that has been inherited directly through the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family to which English belongs, whereas all the morphemes in (1b) have been introduced, or borrowed, from Latin, either directly or via French. Even without such historical knowledge, it may strike you that the words in (1b) are on the whole somewhat less common, or more bookish, than those in (1a). This reflects the fact that, among the most widely used words, the Germanic element still predominates. It is thus fair to say that, in English, there is still a strong tendency for complex words to contain a free morpheme at their core.

Is it possible for a bound morpheme to be so limited in its distribution that it occurs in just one complex word? The answer is yes. This is almost true, for example, of the morpheme leg- ‘read’ in legible at (1b): at least in everyday vocabulary, it is found in only one other word, namely illegible, the negative counterpart of legible. And it is absolutely true of the morphemes cran-, huckle- and gorm- in cranberry, huckleberry and gormless. Cranberry and huckleberry are compounds whose second element is clearly the free morpheme berry, occurring in several other compounds such as strawberry, blackberry and blueberry; however, cran- and huckle- occur nowhere outside these compounds. A name commonly given to such bound morphemes is cranberry morpheme. Cranberry morphemes are more than just a curiosity, because they reinforce the difficulty of tying morphemes tightly to meaning. What does cran- mean? Arguably, nothing at all; it is only the entire word cranberry that can be said to be meaningful, and it is certainly the entire word, not cran- by itself, that is in any dictionary. (You may have noticed, too, that although blackberries are indeed blackish, strawberries have nothing obvious to do with straw; so, even if straw- in strawberry is not a cranberry morpheme, it does not by itself make any predictable semantic contribution in this word.)

3.3 Kinds of morpheme: It is time now to bring those two terms into the discussion, and also introduce the term rootfor what I have been calling the ‘core’. It can be emerged from previous studies that, in the native Germanic portion of the vocabulary, the root of a complex word is usually free. Of the non-root morphemes in the words that we have looked at so far, those that precede the root (like en- in enlarge) are called prefixes, while those that follow it are called suffixes(like -ance in performance, -ness in whiteness, and -able in readable). We have encountered far more suffixes than prefixes, and that is not an accident: there are indeed more suffixes than prefixes in English. An umbrella term for prefixes and suffixes (broadly speaking, for all morphemes that are not roots) is affix.

Only root morphemes can be free, so affixes are necessarily bound. We have already noticed that the morphemes -ful and -ness of helpfulness cannot stand on their own. It is easy for anyone who is a native speaker of English to check that the same is true of all the morphemes that I have identified as prefixes and suffixes in (1a) – that is, all the morphemes in these words other than the roots.

At this point, it may seem to some readers that terminology is proliferating unnecessarily. If affixes are always bound, do not ‘bound morpheme’ and ‘affix’ mean essentially the same thing? Likewise, if roots are usually free, do we really need both the terms ‘root’ and ‘free morpheme’? The answer lies in the word ‘usually’ in the previous sentence. Affixes are indeed always bound, but it is not the case that roots are always free. In fact, all the words in (1b) have roots that are bound. The fact of being bound may make a bound root harder to identify and isolate as a morpheme than a free root is; but for most of the examples in (1b) it is possible to find other words in which the same roots appear, such as

audible, auditory and audition alongside audience. A cranberry morpheme can be thought of as a bound root that occurs in only one word. We have so far encountered two main kinds of complex word: ones with a single free root, as in (1a), and ones with a single bound root, as in (1b). Is it the case, then, that a word can contain no more than one root? Certainly not – indeed, such words are very common; they are compounds, already mentioned in connection with cranberry morphemes. Examples are bookcase, motorbike, penknife, truck-driver. The point of mentioning compounds again now is that, if a complex word can be formed out of two (or more) free roots, it is natural to ask whether a word can contain two or more bound roots. The answer is yes – although, in the light of the English language’s preference for free roots, they are not nearly so common as ordinary compounds. Examples of words with two bound roots are electrolysis, electroscopy, microscopy, microcosm, pachyderm, echinoderm. Other words which, like cranberry, contain one bound and one free root are microfilm, electrometer and Sino-Japanese (assuming that Japanese contains the free root Japan). It will be evident straight away that these are mostly not words in common use; in fact, I would expect few readers of this book to be familiar with all of them. Unlike ordinary compounds, these words are nearly all technical terms of scientific vocabulary, coined self-consciously out of non-English elements, mostly from Latin and Greek. Because of the big difference between ordinary compounds and these learned words, and because of the non-English character of the bound morphemes that compose them, many linguists and dictionary-makers classify these bound morphemes as neither affixes nor bound roots (such as we encountered in (1b)) but place them in a special category of combining forms.Given that native English words generally contain free roots, we might expect that, if a word made up of combining forms is in common use, the morphemes within it should tend to acquire the status of free morphemes.

This expectation turns out to be correct. For example, the word photograph existed, as a learned technical term composed of combining forms, before the word photo; but photo must now be classified as a free morpheme. Other combining forms that have more recently ‘acquired their freedom’ are micro- and macro- (as in at a micro level or on a macro scale) and retro-, as applied to music or fashion.

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