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In morphology, a bound morpheme is a morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word while carrying the lexical meaning related to the one in the word it is taken from. A free or unbound morpheme is the one which can.
Most English language affixes (prefixes and suffixes) are bound morphemes, e.g., -ment in "shipment", or pre- in "prefix", while some are unbound, e.g., in- in "incoming".
Many roots are free morphemes, e.g., ship- in "shipment", while others are bound.
The morpheme ten- in "tenant" may seem free, since there is an English word "ten". However is lexical meaning is derived from the latin word tenere, "to hold", and this or related meaning is not among the meanings of the English word "ten", hence ten- is a bound morpheme in the word "tenant".
There are some distinguished types of bound morphemes.
A cranberry morpheme[1][2] or unique morpheme[3] is the one with extremely limited distribution so that it occurs in only one word. A popular example is cran- in cranberry" (hence the term, "cranberry morpheme").
Cranberry/unique morphemes are examples of the linguistic notion of fossilization: loss of productivity or usage of grammar units: words, phrases, parts of words. Besides fossilized root morphemes, there are also fossilized affixes (suffixes and prefixes).
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