Kinds of Morphemes

Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change either the semantic meaning

or part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the

bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to

a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme, for it inverts

the meaning of the word formed by the root kind.

Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense or a noun's number without affecting the word's

meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the

root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. In English, there are eight

inflections.

Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear with

other lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).

Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and

sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only accompanied by

other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes,

particularly prefixes and suffixes, examples of suffixes are: tion, ation, ible, ing, etc. Bound

morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes.

Phonemes

one of the set of speech sounds in any given language that serve to distinguish one word from another. Aphoneme may consist of several phonetically distinct articulations, which are regarded as identical by native speakers, since onearticulation may be substituted for another without any change of meaning. Thus /p/ and /b/ are separate phonemes in Englishbecause they distinguish such words as pet and bet, whereas the light and dark /l/ sounds in little are not separate phonemes sincethey may be transposed without changing meaning

IPA

The International Phonetic Alphabet (unofficially—though commonly—abbreviated IPA) is

an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by

the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of oral

language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers,

linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators,

and translators.

The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of oral

language: phones, phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent

additional qualities of speech, such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palate,

an extended set of symbols called the Extensions to the IPA may be used.

Difference between linguistics and mental

Linguistics is the science of human language.  Although the modern term 'linguistics' derives from the Latin word for tongue, lingua, the true organ of language is the human mind.  We even call languages "tongues," but language is first and foremost a mental process that only secondarily involves the tongue, lips, and vocal cords--the so-called organs of speech.  It is often repeated that our complex language separates us from all other species--that language is the hallmark of our unique human intellect.

The concept of mental grammar was popularized by American linguist Noam in his groundbreaking work Syntactic Structures (1957). As Binder and Smith have observed, "This focus on grammar as a mental entity allowed enormous progress to be made in characterizing the structure of languages”