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Morphemes. Classification of Morphemes





Words consist of morphemes. The term “morpheme” is derived from Greek morphe — 'form' + -erne. The Greek suffix -erne has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest unit (cf. phoneme, sememe). The morphemeis the smallest meaningful unit of form. Morphemes cannot be segmented into smaller units without losing their constitutive essence, i.e. two-facetedness — association of a certain meaning with a certain sound-pattern. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words but not independently.

Morphemes may have different phonetic shapes. In the word-cluster please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant the root morpheme is represented by the phonetic shapes: [pli:z-] in please, pleasing; [р1ез-] in pleasure; [plez-] in pleasant. All the representations of the given morpheme are called allomorphs or morpheme variants.

Morphemes may be classified from the semantic point of view and from the structural point of view.

Semantically morphemes fall into two types: 1) root-morphemes and 2) non-root morphemes.

Root-morphemes(or radicals)are the lexical nucleus of words. For example, in the words remake, glassful, disorder the root-morphemes -make, glass- and -order are understood as the lexical centres of the words. The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster, e.g. the morpheme teach- in to teach, teacher, teaching.

Non-root morphemesinclude inflectional morphemes (or inflections) and affixational morphemes (or affixes). Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms, whereas affixes are relevant for building various types of stems. Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes.

Affixes are divided into prefixes and suffixes. A prefixis a derivational morpheme preceding the root-morpheme and modifying its lexical meaning. A suffixis a derivational morpheme following the root and forming a new derivative in a different part of speech or a different word class.



Structurally morphemes fall into three types: 1) free morphemes; 2) bound morphemes; 3) semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes.

A free morphemeis defined as one that coincides with the stem or a word-form. For example, the root-morpheme friend- of the noun friendship is naturally qualified as a free morpheme because it coincides with one of the forms of the word friend.

A bound morphemeoccurs only as a constituent part of a word. Affixes are bound morphemes for they always make part of a word.

Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemesare morphemes that can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme. For example, the morphemes well and half on the one hand occur as free morphemes that coincide with the stem and the word-form in the utterances to sleep well, half an hour, on the other hand well and half occur as bound morphemes in the words well-known, half-done.

Structurally derivational bases fall into three groups: 1. Bases that coincide with morphological stems, e.g. dutiful, dutifully; to day-dream, daydreamer,

Stems that serve as this class of bases may be of different derivational types thus forming derivational bases of different degrees of complexity:

a) root stems, which consist of only one, semantically non-motivated constituent, e.g. pocket, motion, retain;

b)derived stems, which are semantically or structurally motivated formed by means of different word-building processes such as affixation, conversion, abbreviation, types of shortenings.

c) compound stems are always binary formed by combining two free e.g. match-box (two simple stems), letter-writer (one simple and one derived stem); aircraft-carrier (a compound and derived stem).

2. Bases that coincide with word-forms, e.g. unsmiling, paper-bound.This class of bases is represented by verbal word-forms — the present and the past participles. The collocability of this class of derivational bases is confined to: 1) a few derivational affixes such as the prefix un- and the suffix -ly, e.g. unnamed, unknown; smilingly, knowingly; 2) other bases which coincide only with nominal and adjectival stems, e.g. mocking-bird, dancing-girl, ice-bound, easy­going.



3. Bases that coincide with word-groups, e.g.flat-waisted, second-rateness.

A derivational pattern(DP) is a regular meaningful arrangement, a structure that imposes rigid rules on the order and the nature of the derivational bases and affixes that may be brought together. DPs are studied with the help of distributional analysis at different levels. Simplificationis defined as a morphological process by which a word of a complex morphological structure loses the meaning of its separate morphological parts and becomes a mere symbol of the notion given.

Aims and Principles of Morphemic and Word-formation Analysis

A synchronic description of the English vocabu­lary deals with its present-day system and its patterns of word-formation. If the analysis is limited to stating the number and type of morphemes that make up the word, it is called morphemic analysis.

A structural word-formation analysisstudies the structural correlation with other words, the structural patterns or rules on which words are built. This is car­ried out with the help of the principle of binary opposi­tions, i.e. by studying the partly similar elements and the differences which are functionally relevant; in our case this difference is sufficient to create a new word.

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