morphemes used in derivation (e.g. -ship, -ness) bear a stronger connection to the meaning of the stem (e.g. friend-ship, drunken-ness) than inflectional ones (e.g. -s in friend-s). That is, the meaning of the inflectional morpheme -s is less central to the meaning of friend than -ship is in a word like friendship. As a result, many derivational morphemes may be understood by language users as part of the word as a whole, whose meaning may be less easy to retrieve.

Inflectional morphemes