[2] However, in some languages, including English and Latin, even many roots cannot stand alone; i.e., they are bound morphemes.
For example, the English plural marker has three allomorphs: /-z/ (bugs), /-s/ (bats), or /-ɪz, -əz/ (buses).
A zero-morpheme is a type of morpheme that carries semantic meaning but is not represented by auditory phoneme.
[8] In some cases, a zero-morpheme may also be used to contrast with other inflected forms of a word that contain an audible morpheme.
Both categories may seem very clear and intuitive, but the idea behind them is occasionally more difficult to grasp since they overlap with each other.
[10] Examples of ambiguous situations are the preposition over and the determiner your, which seem to have concrete meanings but are considered function morphemes since their role is to connect ideas grammatically.
For example, the suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g. sell ⇒ seller) or inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller).
For example, the word Madagascar is long and might seem to have morphemes like mad, gas, and car, but it does not.
An agent morpheme is an affix like -er that in English transforms a verb into a noun (e.g. teach → teacher).
The definition of morphemes also plays a significant role in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following theoretical constructs: