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A form is considered to be free if it may stand alone without
changing its meaning; if not, it is a bound form, so called because
it is always bound to something else. For example, comparing the
words sportive and elegant and their parts, we see that sport,
sortive, elegant may occur alone as utterances, whereas eleg-, -ive,
-ant are bound forms because they never occur alone. A word is,
by L. Bloomfield's definition, a minimum free form. A morpheme
is said to be either bound or free.
Words are segmented into morphemes with the help of the
method of Immediate and Ultimate Constituents, first
suggested by L. Bloomfield.
Coming back to the issue of word segmentability as the first
stage of the analysis into immediate constituents, all English words
fall into two large classes:
1) segmentable words, i.e. those allowing of segmentation
into morphemes, e.g. information, unput, downable, silently and
2) non-segmentable words, i.e. those not allowing of such
segmentation, e.g. boy, wife, call, etc.
There are three types of segmentation of words: complete,
conditional and defective. Complete segmentability is
characteristic of words whose the morphemic structure is
transparent enough as their individual morphemes clearly stand out
within the word lending themselves easily to isolation. Its
constituent morphemes recur with the same meaning in many other
words, e.g. establishment, agreement.
Conditional morphemic segmentability characterizes words
whose segmentation into constituent morphemes is doubtful for
semantic reasons. For instance, in words like retain, detain, or
receive, deceive the sound-clusters [ri], [di], on the one hand, can
be singled out quite easily due to their recurrence in a number of
words, on the other hand, they sure have nothing in common with
the phonetically identical morphemes re-. de- as found in words
like rewrite, reorganize, decode, deurbanize; neither the sound-
clusters [ri], [di] nor the sound-clusters [-tein], [si:v] have any

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