Free morpheme

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In linguistics, free morphemes (sometimes also referred to as unbound morphemes) are morphemes that can stand alone, unlike bound morphemes, which occur only as parts of words. In the English sentence colourless green ideas sleep furiously, for example, colour, green, idea, and sleep are all free morphemes, whereas -less, -s and -ly are all bound morphemes.

Many languages of East Asia have free morphemes, but not bound ones, such as the Chinese languages, the Tai languages, and Vietnamese.

[edit] See also

• bound morpheme
• root morpheme
• grammatical particle