Phonemes A phoneme is the smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning. These units are identified within the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Australian English uses 47 symbols to describe the consonant, monophthong and diphthong sounds used regularly by its speakers.

Morphemes A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. A morpheme can be an entire word, or its constituent parts. The way morphemes operate in language provides the subject matter of morphology.

The term morphology comes from the Greek word ‘form’ or ‘shape’ Morphology refers to the branch of linguistics concerned with word formation i.e. how words are structured. The term morphology comes from the Greek word ‘form’ or ‘shape’

Types of Morpheme There are two types of morpheme – free or bound. Free morphemes can exist on their own within a sentence – school, boy, lady, like. Bound morphemes cannot exist on their own. They must attach to a free morpheme as an affix (prefix or suffix): dis-, anti-, -s.

Classes of Bound Morpheme There are two classes of bound morpheme – inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphemes modify the grammatical class of words by signaling a change in number, person, gender, tense, and so on, but they do not shift the base form into another part of speech. Derivational morphemes constitute the second class of morphemes and they modify a word according to its lexical and grammatical class. They result in more profound changes on base words, which can include a change of word class.

Inflectional Morphemes Inflectional morphemes provide grammatical information, but they do not change the meaning of a word or its part of speech. -s plural (nouns) -‘s possessive (nouns) -er comparative (adjectives) -est superlative (adjectives) -s 3rd person singular present (verbs) -ed past tense (verbs) -ing present participle (verbs) -en past participle (verbs)

Derivational Morphemes Derivational morphemes are affixes that can change the meaning of a word to create a new one. Vaccine + ate = Vaccinate (Noun to Verb) Sing + er = Singer (Verb to Noun) Quiet + ly = Quietly (Adjective to Adverb) Pink + ish = Pinkish (Adjective to Adjective)