The morpheme structure of the word The morpheme

The morpheme structure of the word. The morpheme. Lecture 2

Lecture outline Morphology as a subfield of grammar. The morpheme: definition and design feature. Morphemes, morphs, allomorphs. Morpheme typologies.

Morphology as a subfield of grammar Literally from Greek – ‘the study of forms’; used in biology for ‘form and structure of living organisms; the 19 th c. , linguistics, a cover term for inflection and word formation; school grammar: morphology is the study of word forms, word classes and their categories.

The importance of morphology Change of language perspective – change of the “main unit of language”; phonemes (the 19 th c. ) – morphemes and words (up to mid 50 s of the 20 th c. ) – sentences (in the 50 s of the 20 th c. ); nowadays: from putting morphology in the centre of linguistic investigation to seeing it as inferior to syntax.

The importance of morphology A. Spencer (linguist, Stanford University Professor): morphology is the dominant discipline; it studies words; the word is at the interface between phonology, syntax, and semantics. N. Rayevskaya (a Soviet linguists): inferior to syntax; less than ¼ of Modern English words possess a distinctive morphological form; their syntactic properties and context are more important.

The morpheme Baudouin de Courtenay: as a general term for linear components of the word – the root and the affixes. Vendryes: as any means of expressing the grammatical meaning (will, for, because); Smirnitsky: morpheme as the smallest language unit which possesses the essential characteristics of a language, it has the content side and the expression side. Ivanova: morpheme as the minimal linear unit of grammatical analysis, the minimal meaningful unit; a two-fold entity.

The morpheme Linguistic dictionary: morpheme is theoretical basic element in structural language analysis; the smallest meaningful element of language that cannot be reduced into smaller elements, e. g. book, three, it, long. Morphemes are abstract (theoretical) units.

The morpheme is the minimal indivisible meaningful unit which participates in the formation of the word.

The allo-emic theory Descriptive linguists: the linguistic unit can be described by means of -eme (phone, morpheme, lexeme) terms and alloterms (allophones, allomorphs).

Eme-terms vs. Allo-terms Eme-terms: the generalized invariant units of language characterized by a certain functional status. Allo-terms: the concrete manifestations, or variants of the generalized units.

Morphemes, morphs, allomorphs Morpheme as the abstract unit of language (not speech): the morpheme ‘plural’: cat+plural, sheep+plural, men+plural. The morpheme is phonetically and phonologically represented by morphs, the smallest meaningful units: cat-s (-s ending), sheep, men. If such morphs have the same meaning but are realized through different forms, they are called allomorphs: -s, no change of sound (sheep-sheep), vowel interchange (man-men); Morpheme ‘plural’ – morph -s – allomorphs are /s/, /z/, /iz/ as in books, radios, and houses, as well as -en, and -ø (in doors, oxen, and sheep).

The types of allomorphs additive (look-ed, small-er), opposed to the absence of morphemes or zeromorphemes; replacive (men, stood, feet), grammatical interchange; phonemically conditioned: /s, z, iz/ in books, boys, boxes).

Morphemes, morphs, allomorphs the morpheme is an abstraction, the notion from the sphere of language; morphs are speech notions, occur in utterances; the morpheme as a set of morphs can be represented by its variants – allomorphs.

Morphemes: traditional classification root-morphemes (roots) and affixal morphemes (affixes); the root expresses the concrete, "material" part of the meaning of the word; is the common lexical element of words within a word family: formate, formativelv, formational, formalistic, formality; the affixes express the specificational part of the meaning of the word; the affixal morphemes: prefixes, suffixes, and inflexions. OR: affixal morphemes are further subdivided into prefixes and suffixes; the suffixes can be derivation(al) (teach-er) or inflectional (work-ed).

Morpheme classification: a different approach

The degree of self-dependence free morphemes vs. bound morphemes free morphemes can build words themselves: free-ly; bound morphemes, can only be the components of the word: free-ly.

Free morphemes Lexical morphemes: boy, run, tell, etc. (notional words, content words). Functional morphemes: for, and, because, etc. (functional words)

Bound morphemes Derivational: to build new words, usu. of a different grammatical category: act – act -or, hand – hand-ful. Inflectional: to indicate the aspects of the grammatical meaning: bigg-er, watch-es, etc.

On the basis of formal presentation overt morphemes vs. covert morphemes o overt morphemes are explicit morphemes; o covert morphemes are identified as a contrastive absence of morpheme expressing a certain function (zeromorphemes). o book vs. books

On the basis of linear characteristics continuous (or linear) morphemes vs. discontinuous morphemes continuous (uninterruptedly expressed): working; discontinuous (a two-element grammatical unit): Ger. ge+lieb +t, in Enlgish: have …-en (have given).

Conclusion Morphology is the study of word structure, word classes and their grammatical categories. The morpheme is the meaningful, indivisible unit of language. The morpheme is realized through morphs in speech. Morphs can have allomorphs – speech variants. Morphemes can be: root and affixal (prefixes and suffixes, derivational and inflectional); free (lexical, functional) and bound(derivational and inflectional); overt and covert; continuous and discontinuous.