Talk:Bound and free morphemes

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Merge candidate
Merge with Free Morpheme - both are part of the same definition (this being an inverse of Free or Unbounded Morpheme. A similar comment will be made in Unbounded Morpheme in the hope someone will combine these definitions! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jp adelaide (talk • contribs) 14:38, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Antidote example
"Antidote" is not a good example of how to extract an unbound morpheme, as the "dote" in "antidote" comes from Greek. The English word "dote" is unrelated and its presence in English is coincidental. I'll replace it with a better example as soon as I can think of one. A. Parrot (talk) 21:54, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Tenant
Surely 'ten' is not a morpheme at all in this case? But part of the larger morpheme tenant?

Definitely so. That 'example' has been removed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.152.84.2 (talk) 01:27, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Nope. Restored. - Altenmann >t 17:54, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

'ten' is a morpheme here. Other examples would be 'untenable' and 'intention' (in the philosophical sense). Makeminemaudlin (talk) 07:01, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

It's a very confusing example though, as the "ten" in "tenant" is a cranberry morpheme. The example mixes two concepts. It's worth pointing out that a span of letters in a word might not refer to a word that they might form, as in "tenant". But it's confusing to then have "ten" happen to correspond to a different morpheme --- and then that morpheme happen to be a cranberry morpheme. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 110.174.4.24 (talk) 06:41, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Red-herring alert: The "ten" in "tenfold" has nothing to do with the "ten" in "tenant" and as such is completely irrelevant here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.29.76.37 (talk) 16:29, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Are affixes always bound, or not?
This article—on bound morphemes—states that affixes are always bound. But the article on morphemes suggests that -able in unbreakable is an example of a free morpheme. Aboctok (talk) 18:05, 5 September 2011 (UTC)


 * The connection between the adjective suffix (often spelled "-ible" and never stressed in normally-connected speech) and the separate word "able" is somewhat remote in modern English... AnonMoos (talk) 01:52, 25 November 2012 (UTC)


 * It's not terribly remote; "able" usually means "able to " or "able to be ed", and the suffix is productive in these senses. —Toby Bartels (talk) 11:30, 13 May 2014 (UTC)


 * It's certainly not evident to illiterate speakers of English. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:36, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Speedometer Example
The article indicates that bound morphemes cannot stand alone. But a "meter" certainly stands alone as a word (as in water meter, gas meter, etc.). I get the -o- being an empty one, but I think this is a mistake. Masaryk19 (talk) 21:38, 22 September 2020 (UTC) Masaryk19 (talk) 21:38, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree, and came to this talk page to say the same thing. Meter certainly stands alone and so speedometer can't be the best example here. I might suggest a word like metropolis to replace speedometer. However I don't understand the topic well enough (It's new to me) to be the one authoritatively giving the examples. Can someone with more experience of this topic please either correct speedometer or explain why it is used? Preferably put this explanation into the article as I'm sure other readers would also be confused by this example. Thank you!Rusl (talk) 18:23, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I also agree, it seems like an obvious mistake. And as there are already examples consisting of a free morpheme followed by two bound morphemes, it actually seems like "speedometer" makes for a decent example, but the third morpheme simply needs to be relabelled as a free morpheme. (And since this query has been around for over two years with no counterargument, I'm going to change it as such now.) Ben wren (talk) 14:53, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

”Occurrence in isolation” section is ambiguous phrased
”Johnny is running” is used as an example for a pair of related concepts that are implied to be mutually exclusive, yet the copy fails to make a clear distinction *why* ”Johnny is running” can be *both*.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about this to edit/clarify and be confident the resulting text's correctness. Elfgrrl (talk) 10:35, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Where does it say it can be both? Nardog (talk) 10:48, 28 April 2022 (UTC)