morfemy

Morfemy are the smallest units of meaning in language from which words are built. In morphology, they are the fundamental building blocks that can carry semantic information or grammatical function. Morfemy can be free, meaning they can stand alone as words (for example, cat, run), or bound, meaning they must attach to another morpheme (such as plural -s or past -ed). Some morfemy may serve multiple roles depending on their position and context.

In linguistic analysis, morfemy are identified by segmenting words into minimal meaningful pieces. Morfemy fall into two broad categories: free morfemy, which convey core lexical content, and bound morfemy, which modify meaning or grammatical relations. Within this framework, derivational morfemy create new words or lexical classes (happy → happiness), while inflectional morfemy indicate grammatical information such as number, tense, or case (cat → cats, walk → walked). A single word can host several morfemy in sequence, reflecting complex morphology.

Allomorphy describes variants of the same morfem that appear in different phonological environments, such as plural endings that alternate in form. The study of morfemy extends across languages, revealing how different linguistic systems assemble words through combining and modifying morfemy. In Polish and other languages, morfemy is the plural form of the singular morfem, reflecting how terminology can vary by language.

See also: morpheme, morphology, allomorphy.