Inner structure of the word

The word consists of morphemes. The term morpheme is derived from Greek morphe (form) + -eme. The Greek suffix -eme denotes the smallest significant or distinctive unit.

The morpheme is thesmallest meaningful unit which has a sound form and meaningand occurs in speech only as a part of a word. 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. They are not divisible into smaller meaningful units. So the morpheme is the minimum double - facet (form/meaning) meaningful language unit that can be subdivided into phonemes.

Phonemes are the smallest single-facet 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.

A morpheme is considered to be free if it may stand alone without changing its meaning; if not, it is a bound morpheme because it is always bound to something else. For example, sport, sportive, elegant may occur alone as utterances, whereas their parts eleg-, -ive, -ant are bound morphemes because they never occur alone.