Is 'hand' in 'beforehand' a morpheme?

I'm not 100% sure if the 'hand' in 'beforehand' is a morpheme as it can function as a standalone word instead of the suffixes and prefixes which make up most morphemes, such as -ly, -ing, -ed, etc. I'm willing to stake the claim that it is a morpheme in the above case, but I also want a second opinion to verify the possible truth to my claim.

Solution 1:

The concept of "morpheme" is not very precise or easy to verify. Morphemes can be defined basically as specific linguistic forms that are associated with a "unit" of meaning.

It is completely normal for a morpheme to be able to function as a standalone word. The category of morphemes like this is called "free morphemes". Morphemes that cannot be used as standalone words, like the prefixes and suffixes that you mention, are called "bound morphemes".

For example, the word "seeing" is composed of two morphemes: the free morpheme "see" and the bound morpheme "-ing".

The tricky part about analyzing a word like "beforehand" is figuring out to what extent it is actually divisible in form and meaning. Etymologically, each syllable actually originates in a separate morpheme: the prefix be-, the adverb fore and the noun hand. But you could argue that English speakers don't normally think of before as being composed of two separate parts, so it has functionally become one morpheme. In that case, you would have to consider whether the same argument implies that beforehand also functions as a single morpheme. Depending on your conclusion, beforehand could be one or two morphemes.

John Lawler suggested in a comment that even if beforehand is analyzed as containing two morphemes, the fact that the morpheme -hand doesn't contribute the same meaning as the free word "hand" could lead to it being considered as "cranberry morph". That's a name that's applied to bound morphemes where the "unit of meaning" seems to only exist in the role of differentiating the meaning of a single word. The prototypical example of a "cranberry morph" is the "cran-" in "cranberry": it adds some meaning, since "cranberry" doesn't mean the same thing as "berry", but modern English speakers tend not to have any definite idea about what "cran-" would mean outside of the specific word "cranberry". The "hand" in "beforehand" doesn't seem quite the same to me since I think it is fairly recognizable to English speakers that it is derived from the free morpheme hand.