Morphology General principles Structures of English words Лекция

Morphology: General principles. Structures of English words Лекция 4

Key words and notions to be remembered Morpheme Stem Derivation Compound words Conversion Productivity Allomorph Potential words

What is “morpheme”? In English, as in many other languages, the word is the smallest autonomous unit. Most words are composite in their structure. They consist of meaningful parts, called morphemes. The word “morpheme” comes from the Ancient greek “morphe”, meaning “form”.

What is a morpheme? A morpheme is often defined as the minimum (smallest) meaningful part of the word, or the smallest meaningful unit of the language. Unlike a word, a morpheme can’t stand in isolation, although it may coincide with a word. E. x. one of the morphemes making up the adjective “heartily” coincides with the noun “heart”. A morpheme can no further be divided into meaningful parts. Its component parts are phonemes, which have no meaning of their own.

Morphemes Identification of morphemes in various texts shows that morphemes may have different phonemic shapes. In the word-cluster please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant the root-morpheme is represented by phonemic shapes: [pli: z] in please, pleasing, [plez] in pleasure and [plez] in pleasant. In such cases we say that the phonemic shapes of the word stand in complementary distribution or in alternation with each other.

Morphemes All the representations of the given morpheme that manifest alteration are called allomorphs of that morpheme or morpheme variants. Thus [pli: z, plez] and [рlез] are allomorphs of оде and the same morpheme. The root-morphemes in the word-cluster duke, ducal, duchess, duchy or poor, poverty may also serve as examples of the allomorphs of one morpheme.

Types of morphemes in English Morphemes may be classified: 1) from the semantic point of view, 2) from the structural point of view. Semantically morphemes fall into two classes: root-morphemes and non-root or affixational morphemes. Roots and affixes make two distinct classes of morphemes due to the different roles they play in word -structure.

Semantic classification Roots and affixational morphemes are generally easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt as, e. g. , in the words helpless, handy, blackness, Londoner, refill, etc. The root-morphemes help-, hand-, black-, London-, fill are understood as the lexical centres of the words, as the basic constituent part of a word without which the word is inconceivable.

The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of a word, it has an individual lexical meaning shared by no other morpheme of the language. Besides it may also possess all other types of meaning proper to morphemes except the part-of-speech meaning which is not found in roots. The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster, for example the morpheme teach-in to teach, teacher, teaching, theor- in theory, theorist, theoretical, etc.

Non-root morphemes include 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. Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes.

Affixes are classified into prefixes and suffixes: a prefix precedes the root-morpheme, a suffix follows it. Affixes besides the meaning proper to root-morphemes possess the part-of-speech meaning and a generalised lexical meaning. Affixes serve to express formal, or grammatical meaning. The function of an affix is to form a new word from an existing one. This process is called derivation.

Affixes The part of a word containing the root and the affix with the part-of-speech meaning is called a stem. If a stem coincides with the root, it iis called a simple stem. It is also a free stem if it can stand in isolation, otherwise it is a bound stem. Bound stems are typical of borrowed foreign words.

Suffixes and prefixes Suffixes are especially productive in forming new words, often changing the part-of-speech meaning, as “quickly” is formed from “quick”. Prefixes do not usually change the part-of-speech meaning, as in “lucky-unlucky”, “like-dislike”.

Productive and non-productive affixes Affixes can be classified into productive and non- productive. One of the most productive in English is the noun-forming “er” suffix as it observed in many words and is regularly used to form new words. Other productive noun-forming suffixes are “ness”, “ing” (thinness, loveliness, singing, reading).

Non-productive affixes ‘Don”, “hood”, “ship” are less productive (wisdom, kingdom, friendship). They are useful in forming rare but expressive neologisms and nonce-words like “egghood” (the state of being an egg in the life of a hen), lobsterdom (used in Charles Kingsley’s “Water babies” to describe the ‘social”life of lobsters).

Affixes According to their function affixes are divided into derivational and functional. Functional affixes serve to express syntactical relations between words and are therefore studied in grammar. Derivational affixes form new words with a different lexical or lexico-grammatical meaning. The suffix “y”, for example, is used to create adjectives from noun stems.

Derivational and functional affixes The basic difference between derivational and functional affixes is that a derivational affix does not prevent a word from being equivalent to another word, in which that affix is absent, so they may replace one another in a given context. In other words, they have an identical distribution. Another difference is that a derivative form is capable of further derivatio(fool-foolishly-foolishness). A functional affix can only foolow an affix of derivation, and no further affixes can be added after it.

Structural classification Structurally morphemes fall into three types: free morphemes, bound morphemes, semi-free (semi- bound) morphemes. A free morpheme is defined as one that coincides with the stem or a word-form. Many root-morphemes are free morphemes, 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 noun friend.

Structural classification A bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word. Affixes are, naturally, bound morphemes, for they always make part of a word, e. g. the suffixes -ness, ship, -ise (-ize), etc. , the prefixes un-, dis-, de-, etc. (e. g. readiness, comradeship, unnatural, to displease).

Structural classification Many root-morphemes also belong to the class of bound morphemes which always occur in morphemic sequences, i. e. in combinations with ‘ roots or affixes. All unique roots and pseudo-roots are-bound morphemes. Such are the root-morphemes theor- in theory, theoretical, etc. , barbar-in barbarism, barbarian, etc. , -ceive in conceive, perceive, etc.

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

Groups of morphemes Speaking of word-structure on the morphemic level two groups of morphemes should be specially mentioned. To the first group belong morphemes of Greek and Latin origin often called combining forms, e. g. telephone, telegraph, phonoscope, microscope, etc. The morphemes tele-, graph-, scope-, micro-, phone- are characterised by a definite lexical meaning and peculiar stylistic reference: tele- means ‘far’, graph- means ‘writing’, scope ’seeing’, micro- implies smallness, phone- means ’sound. ’ Comparing words with tele- as their first constituent, such as telegraph, telephone, telegram one may conclude that tele- is a prefix and graph-, phone-, gram-are root-morphemes.

Groups of morphemes The second group embraces morphemes occupying a kind of intermediate position, morphemes that are changing their class membership. The root-morpheme man- found in numerous words like postman ['poustmэn], fisherman [fi∫эmэn], gentleman ['d 3 entlmэn] in comparison with the same root used in the words man-made ['mænmeid] and man-servant.

Morphemic analysis The morphemic analysis helps to classify words into: - root words, consisting of one morpheme (root or stem) such as girl. - derived words, combining a root with one or more affixes, as girlish or girlishness - compound words, made up of two or more stems, as girl-friend. - compound derivatives, originating from a phrase, as “old-maidish” derived not from old and maidish but from old and maid.

Morphemic analysis However, a morphemic analysis does not make it possible to determine the word-formation patterns, or the morphemic structure of the word, since it ignores the order in which the morphemes were joined together. This is analyzed by the word-formation analysis. The main principle of any analysis in lexicology is that of opposition.

Morphemic analysis The opposition girl/girlish is a binary opposition because it includes two elements. To prove it is a regular opposition, we must find other contrasting pairs of words with the same affix which gives us a morphological correlation: Child/childish Monkey/monkeyish A further study enables us to say that “ish” is a productive suffix in English. It forms derived adjectives from noun stems.

The IC (immediate constituents) analysis This analysis was first suggested by L. Boomfield and is a purely synchronic procedure, showing not the history or etymology of the word, but its morphological motivation, or the derivation pattern according to which it is formed. This analysis shows in which sequence new morphemes were added on in the process of word formation. The IC analysis is based on a dichotomic (binary division) principle which means that a word to be analyzed is cut, at each successive step, into two parts. Just where the cut is made depends on how strong connections between the morphemes are.