welcome to morphology today we're going to start composition of words and we're going to introduce a morpheme right off the bat so what is a morpheme a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language so here's some examples in English we have words like train and fat we know what these words mean and they don't have any augments to them so when you think of train you think of one object and when you think of fat you think of well you think of one specific property now there's other types of morphemes here like er which is a comparative morpheme so if we say fatter if you say fat tur and combine the two so if you take these two together it makes the word fatter there's Sometimes some other letter changes in there but this is just the underlying morpheme and it means that something is fatter than the other it is more fat than something else you're comparing it to and there's also the s morpheme which is the pleural morpheme so you can combine train with the pleural morpheme and you can make trains so these have the smallest unit of meaning we may never see some of these morphemes on their own like you would never just see ER in a sentence all by itself you have to attach it to a word but it still has a unit of meaning attached to it so here's a question how many morphemes are in each of these words okay well you can do this along with me if you want to pause the video and do it real quick go right ahead attempting okay well tempting hmm well is something tempting is is there a word tempt oh is he tempted by it yeah you can say tempted so that means that there must be a root of Temps and then there's this suffix ing so we have two morphemes here we have tempt as a word and ing as a progressive meaning so it's Progressive the action of tempt is ongoing okay what about dog okay well this is fairly straightforward it's a word has no suffixes or anything so dog is just a morpheme on its own cats well you have the idea of a cat and then you have the pleural morpheme so that's two judgers okay this one a little bit trickier so we know this s here means there's more than one okay and we know judge is a word so we have judge and then we have this ER okay so we have three morphemes here judge ER and S so judge is our verb here or it might even be a noun we don't quite know which one it is it doesn't necessarily matter so we have this judge and then we have this ER that makes it a judger so that's a person and then judgers is a multiple people or is multiple people not is a multiple people so this word judgers is composed of three different units of meaning that we aren't even aware is happening when we do it so how do we do this well first we need to distinguish types of morphemes so there's free morphemes and there's bound morphemes so free morphings three free morphemes are Standalone which means they're words we can use them in a sentence on their own while bound morphemes we can't so jump you can say jump on its own so jump is free but this ER is bound because we can't just say yeah that ER over there is doing something no it this bound morpheme modifies the word jump what about implied well implied is made up of the word imply and the past tense suffix so this e d is going to be bound to the word imply and of course all words are free so imply is a free morpheme what about faithful well faith is a word so it's free on its own and full is a suffix that attaches to Faith so it's going to be bound so normally when we write free and bound morphemes if it's free it's just going to be a word we'll call it x y z and if it's bound then it's going to look like one of these three forms it's going to have a dash with an X Y or whatever letters to symbolize it being a suffix you might have X Y on the front and these can be any letters with a dash on the right to be a prefix or an infix might look something like that of course those are just variables so we have Ed takes this form right here okay so that's the difference between free and bound morphemes so affixes affixes are prefixes suffixes infixes so these don't have lexical categories so they're not nouns they're not verbs they're not adjectives they're just morphemes they're just bound morphemes and they attach to words to either change or to keep the lexical categories the same so I'll show you that in a second so let's classify affixes and draw some trees okay well we have prefixes now prefixes attached to the beginning of words here so we have unkind and deactivate so what we do when we draw trees is we just put the prefix out front and we separate it from the morpheme so we just separate all of our morphemes here so again on in kind are two different morphemes un is an affix so we write AF kind is an adjective and we link them up so un and kind makes unkind and that is also an adjective okay what about deactivate well we have d and we have activate D is an fx activate is a verb and deactivate together is also a verb so we take our prefix combine it with our free morpheme and it becomes a new word all right suffixes suffixes come on the end of words and we do this the same way we have vividly and clue less so vivid is a hmm it is an adjective you can describe something as being Vivid l y is just an affix and we can combine them to make vividly now of course what type of word is vividly he vividly described the outcome so this is actually an adverb so we can see here that this affix actually changed the word type of vivid it changed its category that's kind of interesting okay what about Clueless well clue is a noun and less is just an affix and we can find it together we get clueless which is an adjective so again this affix changed the lexical category of one of our free morphemes it's kind of cool that this can happen so those are prefixes and suffixes there's one more that we don't have in English but we do have in Tagalog so this is a Tagalog example so we have Billy to buy of course my vowels might be off I didn't have a phonetics chart for this but we can get Billy which is by so we have Billy right here and then we have Benelli to mean bot so what happens here is we take B and we just add in this morpheme in the center and what's the difference between buy and Bot well this is present tense to buy and this is past tense for bot so this ni infix that goes in the middle of words is the past tense morpheme now drawing a tree for this it's not exactly possible at least it's not possible to be nice and neat looking so we're not going to draw trees for infixes but these are another type of affix that occurs in other languages so infixes are cool let's do some practice here draw them yourself and I will do them in just a moment here okay well hopefully you try this out we're going to start off with books because books is pretty straightforward we have the word book and we have the plural s so book is a noun the plural s is just an affix and we can combine them together to make a new noun books okay not that bad let's try blackened so black is a word blacken yeah you can blacken something so we have this suffix en and we also have this suffix ed so we kind of have this multi-layered tree so black ah we'll call this an adjective and then we have two affixes here now how do we combine affixes well bound morphemes have to be attached to free morphemes or to other bound morphemes so what we'll do is we will attach the morpheme black the free morpheme to the closest bound morpheme first so we have blacken now blacken what is black and that is a verb okay you can black in something okay what about black end it was blackened so this is also a verb Okay so there are two trees for some words now you notice here that this suffix s did not change the lexical category but this suffix en changed the category here and this Ed category or this Ed morpheme didn't change the category okay what's what's up with this well next time we're going to talk about the difference between those two which is derivational versus inflectional morphemes and then we're going to talk about how some morphemes work in other languages and there are sometimes internal changes sometimes this thing called depletion happens reduplication and there's also stress differences when we speak words so next time we'll cover these as always if you have any questions leave them in the comments below and if you want to check out more videos go to trevututor.com and there's more there so have a great day and I'll see you guys hopefully next time