Greek suffix -eme has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest significant ordistinctive unit.The morpheme may be defined asthe smallest meaningful unit which has a sound form and meaning, occurring in speech only as a part of a word. In other words, a morpheme is an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Nor are they divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is why the morpheme may also be defined as the minimumdouble-facet(shape/meaning) meaningful language unit that can be subdivided into phonemes (the smallest singlefacet distinctive units of language with no meaning of their own). So there are 3 lower levels of a language – a phoneme, a morpheme, a word.
Word building (word-formation) is the creation of new words from elements already existing in a particular language. Every language has its own patterns of word formation. Together with borrowing,word-buildingprovides for enlarging and enriching the vocabulary of the language.
A form is considered to be free if it may stand alone without changing its meaning; if not, it isa bound form, so called because it is always bound to something else. For example, comparing the wordssportive andelegant and their parts, we see thatsport, sortive, elegant may occur alone as utterances, whereaseleg-, -ive, -ant are bound forms because they never occur alone. A word is, by L. Bloomfield's definition, a minimum free form. A morpheme is said to be either bound or free. This statement should be taken with caution because some morphemes are capable of forming words without adding other morphemes, being homonymous to free forms.
Words are segmented into morphemes with the help of the method of morphemic analysis whose aim is to split the word into its constituent morphemes and to determine their number and types.
