1 The notion of morph. Its types

The morph is a minimum meaningful succession of phonemes that can not be divided into any meaningful units and which regularly occurs in different environments.

e. g clear

clearly

clears

clearing

cleared

here clear is a morph because:

• it’s meaningful = it has its lexical meaning of ясность

• it’s minimum meaningful unit

• occurs in different environments

But on the other hand not each repeated succession of morphemes is a morph (step, stop,street, strike): st is not a morph because

• it has no meaning

• if st is single out from the words the rest of the words is not a morph either

Hands come 2 conclusions:

• each phoneme of the wordform is part of the morph

• if one part of the word is a morph the rest of the word must be a morph too

According to the role in the word-structure morphs are divided into the following types:

• free – is a morph that can function as a separate word (e.g work, friend)

• bound – is morph that can be only part of a word but not a word itself (workers, freedom, greatly)

• semi-bound – is a morph of double- nature, on the one hand it is a word but on the other hand it can be regularly used as a derivational morpheme for producing new words (workman, sportsman,fishman, statesman)

• fused – are morphs that have common phoneme in their structure (really=real+ly)

• amalgamated – are fully fused morphs which represent different morphemes in the same word-form (girls’ = girl+z+z = full refused, express different morphemes = of plurality, of the genitive case)

• replacive – is a morph which is represented by a change of root-sound by means of which a certain grammatical meaning is expressed. (write – wrote, advice (n.) – advise (v.))

2 The notion of morpheme and its types

The notion of morpheme can be approached:

1. externally – morpheme is analyzed as a separate language unit. Morpheme is qualifiede as

• the smallest unit of language

• is the minimum lang. unit having its own content-side and expression-side

• the basic meaningful unit of language and speech

• the smallest meaningful unit having no positional isolatability

2. internally – is defined acc to its inner structure:

• morpheme is a set of morphs having the same meaning but being in the state of complementary distribution.

Distribution – is the total of all environments of unit.

There are 3 types of distribution:

1. contrastive – is such a relationship between morphs when they are added to one and the same stem but express different meanings (e.g played, playing)

2. non-contrastive – is a free alternation relationship (morphs are added to the same stem and express the same meaning: learned=learnt, dreamed=dreamt )

3. complementory – is such a relationship between morphs having the same meaning when one of them occurs in the environment in which the other doesn’t.

In other words, complementory distribution is the relationship between morphs with the same meaning which occur in mutually exclusive environment.

e.g cats,children

Acc. to the type of meaning and role in the word structure :

1. root morpheme is the bearer of the lexical meaning, can be free and bound. The bound root morpheme is always represented by a bound morph.

e.g підняти, перейняти, розняти

the free root morpheme can be represented by morph

e.g worker

2. Derivational morphemes express lexico-grammat. word- building meaning. Represented by:

• prefix

• suffixes

• vowel replacive morph

• consonant replacive morph (advice-advise)

• semantic stress (su bject – sub ject)

3. Inflectional are morphemes express pure grammatical categorical meanings. Two types:

• building up analytical forms: grammatical word morphemes (are of double nature. On the one hand they are words because they can function separately in speech e. g Will you enjoy me after the lecture? – I will. But on the other hand, these words serve the purpose of expressing gram. meanings like any other inflection.)

e.g shall, will- should, would

discontinuous word morphemes are two-element gram. units which consist of an auxiliary part and a specific form of a notional word. (takes place in continious aspect forms, perfect forms, passive forms)

• building up syntactical forms: outer (brake -broke) and inner inflections (send-sent).

Suppletivity is the change of the whole stem of the word by means of which a different gram. meaning is expressed (Ukr. бути – є, Eng good - worse).

Lexico –gram. word –morphemes occur in the so-called analytical words (to take up, to look after. to look for). They are of double nature. On the one hand, they have separate words but on the other hand, it inparts a new meaning to the word.