Types of morphemes

Morphological structure of a word. Word-formation in Modern English

Morphological structure of a word in Modern English

The word and the morpheme

Types of morphemes

Structural types of words

Affixation as a productive way of word-formation. General characteristics of suffixes and prefixes

Productive ways of word-formation

Conversion, its definition.

Word-composition. Classification of compound words

Shortening. Types of clipping: apocope, aphaeresis, syncope. Acronyms.

Non-productive ways of word-formation.

Morphological structure of a word in Modern English

The word and the morpheme

The word is the fundamental unit of language. It is a dialectical unity of form and content. Its content or meaning is not identical to notion, but it may reflect human notions, and in this sense may be considered as the form of their existence. Concepts fixed in the meaning of words are formed as generalised and approximately correct reflections of reality, therefore in signifying them words reflect reality in their content.

The term ‘word’ denotes the basic unit of a language resulting from the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment. The word is a structural and semantic entity within the language system. The term ‘vocabulary’ is used to denote the system formed by the total sum of all the words that the language possesses.

Word is the central linguistic unit with the following main features:

· it is easily distinguished by native speakers

· it is autonomous

· it has grammatical forms and a certain function in the sentence

· it could form a sentence

· it could be broken down into smaller parts

The term morpheme is derived from Gr morphe ‘form’ + -eme. The Greek suffix -eme has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest significant or distinctive unit. (Cf. phoneme, sememe.) The morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a word. A form in these cases is a recurring discrete unit of speech.

the morpheme is the smallest LU with the following main features:

· it is not autonomous

· it can function only as a part of word

· it doesn't posses grammatical categories or any function in the sentence

· it can't be broken down into meaningful parts. In can be broken down only into phonemes.

Allomorphs (morphemic variants) are different phonemic shapes of the morpheme

Types of morphemes

Morphemes may be classified:

a) from the semantic point of view,

b) from the structural point of view.

a) 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.

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 morphemes1 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, whereas affixes are relevant for building various types of stems — the part of a word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. 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.

b) 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 2 or a word-form. A great 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.

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, to activise; unnatural, to displease, to decipher).

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-bound (semi-free) morphemes1 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.

The relationship between the two classifications of morphemes discussed above can be graphically presented in the following diagram:

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