Types of meaning in morphemes

A morpheme is a segment of a word regularly recurrent in other words and having the same meaning in all of its recurrences. Morphemes have lexical, part-of-speech, differential and distributional meanings.

The lexical meaning of roots. Root morphemes possess a kind of generalized lexical meaning which differs from that of affixes. 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.

The meaning of affixes. The meaning of affixes is purely sinificative. For example, the suffix -en carries the meaning ‘the change of quality’. Verbs formed with the help of this suffix express the idea that someone or something has more of a quality than it had previously. If, for example, a river deepens, it becomes deeper than it was before, and if something strengthens a person or group, they become more powerful and secure, or more likely to succeed.

As in words the meaning in morphemes may also be analyzed into denotational and connotational components. For example, endearing and diminutive suffixes, such as -ette (kitchenette, luncheonette); -ie (y) (dearie, girlie); -ling (duckling, wolfling) bear a heavy emotive charge. Morphemes -ly, -like, -ish in the words womanly, womanlike, womanish have the same denotational meaning of similarity but differ in the connotational component (cf. the Russian equivalents: женственный – женский – бабий).

The differential meaning is the semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from other in words containing the same (identical) morphemes. For example, in the word note-book the morpheme note- serves to distinguish the word from other words: exercise-book, copy-book, bookshelf, bookcase.

The distributional meaning is found in all words having more than one morpheme. It is found in the arrangement and order of morphemes making up the word. For example, the word teacher is composed of two morphemes teach- and -er both of which possess the denotational meaning – ‘to give instruction or lessons’ and ‘the doer of the action’. A different arrangement of the same morphemes *erteach would make the word meaningless. More examples, playboy – boy-play, pot flower – flowerpot, board school – school board.

The part-of-speech (functional) meaning is indicative of the part of speech to which a derivational word belongs. If we see the words with the suffixes -ment, -er, -ity, -or, we say that they are nouns, e.g. establishment, plurality, teacher, translator, sailor. If -ful, -less, -able, -al etc. are present in words we say the words are adjectives, e.g. helpful, handless, guiltless, readable, national, writable, operational, openable, proposal.

Pseudo-morpheme – is a morpheme which has a differential and distributional meaning but doesn’t possess any lexical or part-of-speech meaning. For example, in the words retain, detain, contain and receive, deceive, conceive, the clusters re-, de-, con- (having nothing in common with the phonetically identical prefixes re-, de- in the words rewrite, reorganize, deodorize, decode) and -tain, -ceive have no lexical meaning. However they have a differential meaning because re- distinguishes retain from detain, and -tain distinguishes retain from receive. They also have a distributional meaning as their order points at the affixal status of re-, de-, con- and makes one understand -tain, -ceive as roots. But as they lack any lexical meaning of their own, they can be characterizes as pseudo-morphemes. There to approaches to the problem. Some linguists recognize pseudo-morphemes and regard word like retain, detain, receive, deceive as polymorphic derived (affixed) words; others do not recognize pseudo-morphemes and treat these words as monomorphic.

Unique root is a pseudo-morpheme since it has no lexical meaning, but it carries a differential meaning and a distributional meaning that doesn’t occur in other words, whereas is a word, containing a unique root, other morphemes display a more or less clear lexical meaning, e.g. hamlet, cranberry, gooseberry, mulberry, comet.

There’s a close connection between the type of meaning in morphemes and the type of morphemic segmentability. A great number of words are characterized by complete segmentability. In this case individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word and can be easily isolated, their meaning is transparent, e.g. endless, useless. Conditional segmentability is typical for words whose component morphemes are pseudo-morphemes. Defective segmentability is the property of words whose component morphemes are unique ones.

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.

If the analysis is limited to stating the number and the types of morphemes that make up a word, it is referred to as morphemic. For example, the word underestimates may be analyzed into four morphemes: the root -estim-, the prefix under-, lexical suffix -ate and grammatical suffix -s. The morphemic analysis establishes the morphemes that make up the word, regardless of their role in the formation of this word. In other words, the morphemic analysis only defines the morphemes (their number and types) comprising a word, but doesn’t reveal their hierarchy.

The morphemic structure of the word is being established by the method of immediate constituents analysis. This method is based on a binary principle which means that at each stage the word is broken into the components (immediate constituents) after that these components are broken further into two other components. When the components can't be further divided and the analysis is completed we have arrived at the ultimate constituents – the morphemic structure of the word. For example, the morphemic structure of the word underestimates can be represented as a linear structure in the following way: W= {[Pr +(R+L)]+Gr}, or as a hierarchical structure of Immediate Constituents (Diagram 13).

Diagram 13.

Word

St ₁(underestimate-) Gr. Suf. (-s)

Pref (under-) St ₂(-estimate)

R (estim-) Lex. Suf.(-ate)

Derivational analysis studies the structural patterns and rules on which words are built. Analyzing the word-formation structure of a word one tries to answer the question: What was formed from what? One studies the last word-formation act, the result of which is this or that unit. For example, in the word Oxbridgian the last word formation act was suffixation (Oxbridge + -ian), but in the previous word-formation act telescoping took place (Oxford + Cambridge). The verb to dognap is back formation from the word dognapping which was formed by analogy with kidnapping.

The nature, type and arrangement of the ICs (immediate constituent – непосредственная составляющая) of the word is known as its derivative structure. Though the derivative structure of the word is closely connected with its morphemic structure and often coincides with it, it differs from it in principle.

According to the derivative structure all words fall into two big classes: simplexes or simple, non-derived words and complexes or derivatives. Simplexes are words which derivationally cannot be segmented into ICs. The morphological stem of simple words, i.e. the part of the word which takes on the system of grammatical inflections is semantically non-motivated and independent of other words, e.g. hand, come, blue. Derivatives are words which depend on some other simpler lexical items that motivate them structurally and semantically, i.e. the meaning and the structure of the derivative is understood through the comparison with the meaning and the structure of the source word. Hence derivatives are secondary, motivated units, made up as a rule of two ICs, i.e. binary units, e.g. words like friendliness, unwifely, school-masterish, etc. The ICs are brought together according to specific rules of order and arrangement preconditioned by the system of the language. It follows that all derivatives are marked by the fixed order of their ICs.

The basic elementary units of the derivational structure of words are: derivational bases, derivational affixes and derivational patterns.

The derivational base – is the part of the word from which the word was built. Types of derivational bases:

• bases that coincide with morphological stems – dutiful, dutifully;

- bases that coincide with grammatical word-forms – unknown;

- bases the coincide with word-groups – second-rateness.

Derivational affixes are ICs of the derived word in all parts of speech. Derivational affixes are highly selective (the choice depends on etymological, phonological, semantic and structural properties of the base): blacken, scribbler, novelist, befriend, enslave, brainless.

The derivational pattern – is a regular meaningful arrangement, a structure that imposes rigid rules on the order and the nature of the derivational bases and affixes which may be brought together. According to structural formulas all words may be classified into: 1) suffixal derivatives: blackness; 2) prefixal derivatives: rewrite; 3) conversions: a cut; 4) compound words: music-lover. Structural patterns specify the base classes and individual affixes thus indicating the lexico-grammatical and lexical classes of derived words. The affixes refer derivatives to specific parts of speech and lexical subsets. For example, the derivational pattern noun + -ish → Adjective signals a set of adjectives with the lexical meaning of resemblance, e.g. girlish, whereas adjective + -ish → Adjective signals adjectives meaning a small degree of quality, e.g. blackish.

Derivational relations are distinguished into:

- derivative clusters – a set of derivatives that can be formed from the same derivative base (friendship, friendly, unfriendly);

- derivative row – is made up by the derivatives that represent consecutive steps of the derivative from the initial derivative base (friend – friendly – unfriendly – unfriendliness);

- derivative categories – comprises derivations of different derivative patterns brought together by the same generalized derivative meanings:

(Teacher) N=V+er

(Historian) N=N+an

(Activist) N=Adj+ist

(Author) N=N+or.

It should be taken into consideration that the word-building meaning which often depends on the affixal meaning or the number of bases is not the same with the lexical meaning. For example, the word-building meaning of the word writer is ‘a  person or thing that performs an action specified by the derivational base’. The lexical meaning reveals the character of the action – a writer is ‘a person who writes’. The word-building meaning unites words, derived according to the same word-building model with the same semantic consequence, e.g. brainstorming and blamestorming. The group of words united by the same lexical meaning numbers words built up according to different word-building patterns and entering synonymic relation.