The morphological structure of a word. Morphemes. Types of

Morphemes. Allomorphs.

There are two levels of approach to the study of word- structure: the

level of morphemic analysis and the level of derivational or word-formation

analysis.

Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the

largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of

linguistic analysis.

It has been universally acknowledged that a great many words have a

composite nature and are made up of morphemes, the basic units on the

morphemic level, which are defined as the smallest indivisible two-facet

language units.

The term morpheme is derived from Greek morphe “form ”+ -eme. The Greek

suffix –eme has been adopted by linguistic to denote the smallest unit or

the minimum distinctive feature.

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form. A form in these

cases a recurring discrete unit of speech. Morphemes occur in speech only

as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may

consist of single morpheme. Even a cursory examination of the morphemic

structure of English words reveals that they are composed of morphemes of

different types: root-morphemes and affixational morphemes. Words that

consist of a root and an affix are called derived words or derivatives and

are produced by the process of word building known as affixation (or

derivation).

The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of the word; it has a very

general and abstract lexical meaning common to a set of semantically

related words constituting one word-cluster, e.g. (to) teach, teacher,

teaching. Besides the lexical meaning root-morphemes possess all other

types of meaning proper to morphemes except the part-of-speech meaning

which is not found in roots.

Affixational morphemes include inflectional affixes or inflections and

derivational affixes. Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are

thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms. Derivational affixes

are relevant for building various types of words. They are lexically always

dependent on the root which they modify. They possess the same types of

meaning as found in roots, but unlike root-morphemes most of them have the

part-of-speech meaning which makes them structurally the important part of

the word as they condition the lexico-grammatical class the word belongs

to. Due to this component of their meaning the derivational affixes are

classified into affixes building different parts of speech: nouns, verbs,

adjectives or adverbs.

Roots and derivational affixes 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 centers of

the words, and –less, -y, -ness, -er, re- are felt as morphemes

dependent on these roots.

Distinction is also made of free and bound morphemes.

Free morphemes coincide with word-forms of independently functioning

words. It is obvious that free morphemes can be found only among roots, so

the morpheme boy- in the word boy is a free morpheme; in the word

undesirable there is only one free morpheme desire-; the word pen-holder

has two free morphemes pen- and hold-. It follows that bound morphemes are

those that do not coincide with separate word- forms, consequently all

derivational morphemes, such as –ness, -able, -er are bound. Root-morphemes

may be both free and bound. The morphemes theor- in the words theory,

theoretical, or horr- in the words horror, horrible, horrify; Angl- in

Anglo-Saxon; Afr- in Afro-Asian are all bound roots as there are no

identical word-forms.

It should also be noted that morphemes may have different phonemic

shapes. In the word-cluster please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant the

phonemic shapes of the word stand in complementary distribution or in

alternation with each other. All the representations of the given morpheme,

that manifest alternation are called allomorphs/or morphemic variants/ of

that morpheme.

The combining form allo- from Greek allos “other” is used in linguistic

terminology to denote elements of a group whose members together consistute

a structural unit of the language (allophones, allomorphs). Thus, for

example, -ion/ -tion/ -sion/ -ation are the positional variants of the same

suffix, they do not differ in meaning or function but show a slight

difference in sound form depending on the final phoneme of the preceding

stem. They are considered as variants of one and the same morpheme and

called its allomorphs.

Allomorph is defined as a positional variant of a morpheme occurring in

a specific environment and so characterized by complementary description.

Complementary distribution is said to take place, when two linguistic

variants cannot appear in the same environment.

Different morphemes are characterized by contrastive distribution, i.e.

if they occur in the same environment they signal different meanings. The

suffixes –able and –ed, for instance, are different morphemes, not

allomorphs, because adjectives in –able mean “ capable of beings”.

Allomorphs will also occur among prefixes. Their form then depends on

the initials of the stem with which they will assimilate.

Two or more sound forms of a stem existing under conditions of

complementary distribution may also be regarded as allomorphs, as, for

instance, in long a: length n.

Билет № 28

(как я поняла, shortening и есть abbreviation…)

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