As a part-time german language trainer, I have rather unconventional working hours. Often time after long sessions with my students, I let myself rot in my bed, researching about genuinely random topics on the internet. Last day, it was about "lying".

What makes something 'a lie'?

The falsehood of the information being exchanged? The intention of the person who's delivering the information? The rabbit-hole I stepped into, was as usual, engaging.

Hold up! The title mentioned nothing about lies. What am I going with this?

Although the topic I was researching on was interesting enough, It was something else that caught my attention.

While reading through a couple of articles and having ferocious debate with every other LLM, I came across the subfield of Morphology in Linguistics: The study of how words are formed and structured.

And here's what I find fascinating about the field.

But What is Morphology all about?

Simply put, it is about words: what they are made of, how languages create them, and how do they change to express grammar.

Let's understand this through examples:

cat

This word seems complete. There's nothing to breakdown here.

cats: cat + -s

The word cats can be broken down to smaller units, cat and -s. These can't be further divided. In the above example, both cat and -s are called morphemes.

Morpheme: Smallest unit of language that carries meaning or a grammatical function.

Here are a few more examples:

unhappy: un- + happy
replayed: re- + play + -ed

Here, not every morpheme has a dictionary meaning. For example, -ed.

-ed carries the grammatical function of past tense. This information still counts, as it contributes to the overall meaning of the word.

If you have a sharp eye, you might've noticed that some of these morphemes can stand alone where as others can't. For example, happy can exist freely, but un- has no independent existence.

You can say:

I am happy.

But not:

I am un-.

If you caught this, congrats. In Linguistics,

Free morphemes: The morphemes that can exist by themselves. For example, cat, happy, house, etc.

Bound morphemes: The morphemes that cannot exist by themselves. For example, -s, -ed, -ness, etc.

Interesting, right? Now let's look a bit deeper into bound morphemes.

Bound morphemes