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Morphology is part of linguistics. It looks at the way words are put together using small pieces called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has meaning. Different languages have different morphemes and have different rules for how morphemes are combined.

Free and Bound Morphemes
Words are accepted as being the smallest pieces of a sentence. Some words only have one morpheme. For example the English words thank, dog, and slow are all words made up of only one morpheme. A morpheme that can stand alone as a word is called a free morpheme.

Words can also be made up of more than one morpheme. English speakers know that one can add the plural(more than one) morpheme, -s, to the end of dog, and create the word dogs. The new word combines the meanings of the two morphemes, so the meaning of the new word, dogs is more than one dog. While dog is a free morpheme, the plural morpheme -s is not, because it must attach to a word (no native English speaker would use -s as a stand alone word). Morphemes that must be attached to a word are called bound morphemes. Morphemes that attach to the front of a word are called prefixes, those that attach to the end are called suffixes, and some morphemes can attach in the middle of a word and are called infixes.

Inflectional and Derivational Morphemes
There are two types of bound morphemes: derivational and inflectional. Inflectional morphemes give a listener or reader information about how the word is used in a sentence. English does not have a lot of inflectional morphemes. An example of an inflectional morpheme in English is the -ed suffix for verbs. This morpheme at the end of a verb lets the speaker know that the action happened in the past. Another example is the -s suffix for nouns to show that there is more than one of the noun.

Derivational morphemes change the part of speech or somehow change the basic meaning of the word they attach to. Most bound morphemes in English are derivational.

Examples
English Word: "unthankful"

Morphemes:

English Word: "songwriter"

Morphemes:

English Word: "modernized"

Morphemes: