Лекция № 4. Морфема. Алломорф

Morpheme. Allomorph

Linguists define the word as the smallest free form found in language. A word consists of smaller units organized with respect to each other in a particular way. The most important component of word structure is the morpheme (from Greek ‘morphe’ which means ‘form’ + ‘-eme’ which means ‘the smallest destructive unit’). Morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning and function. For example, the word ‘builder’ consists of 2 morphemes: ‘build’ (which carries the meaning of ‘to construct’) + ‘er’ (which shows the function of a noun with the meaning ‘one who builds’).

Some words consist of a single morpheme: ‘train’, ‘boy’. You cannot divide it into some smaller parts: ‘t-rain’ or ‘tr-ain’ as these do not carry information about its meaning and function. Such words are called simple. Complex words are words consisting of 2 and more morphemes.

one morpheme words	two morpheme words	Three morpheme words	Even more morphemes
and
boy	boy-s
hunt	hunt-er	hunt-er-s
act	act-ive	act-iv-ate	re-act-iv-ate

So, morpheme is the smallest indivisible language unit. They are not independent sense units as words or sentences are. They are always used as parts of words. The morpheme is the minimum meaningful language unit.

A morpheme that can be a word by itself is called a free morpheme. A morpheme that is attached to another element is said to be a bound morpheme. For example, in the word ‘boys’ there 2 morpheme: ‘boy’ is a free morpheme and ‘s’ is a bound morpheme.

A free morpheme coincides with the stem of a word-form. A bound morpheme is a constituent part of a word. Affixes are bound morphemes.

Morphemes in various texts can have different phonetic shapes. All the representatives of the given morpheme are called allomorphs (from Greek ‘allos’ which means ‘other) of that morpheme. For example, indefiniteness in English is expressed for 2 forms: article ‘a’ before a consonant and article ‘an’ before a vowel (a car, an orange, ‘an account’). The plural forms ‘s’ has different pronunciation in ‘cats’, ‘dogs’, ‘judges’. Here you select the proper allomorph according to phonological facts.

Different allomorph of one and the same word can be monitored in the example below:

‘halfpenny’ and ‘twopence’

‘poor’ and ‘poverty’

‘divide’ and ‘divisible’

‘receive’ and ‘receptive’.

Лекция № 5. Основные пути и способы словообразования

Ways of word-formation

In order to see the morphological structure of a word, it is necessary to divide it into component parts:

1. a root, which is the morpheme that expresses the lexical meaning of the word: ‘teach’.

2. affixes which are morphemes that modify the meaning of the root. Affixes are divided into prefixes and suffixes.

For example, the word ‘unworkable’ – ‘un’ is the prefix, ‘work’ is the root and ‘able’ is the suffix. The word ‘frightening’ has a root ‘fright’ and 2 suffixes ‘en’ and ‘ing’.

We should distinguish between suffixes and inflections in English. Suffixes form a new part of speech: ‘beauty’ – ‘beautiful’ – ‘beautifully’. Inflections are morphemes used to change grammar forms of the words: ‘work’ – ‘works’ – ‘worked’ – ‘working’.

There are 4 structural types of words in English:

1. simple (root) words consisting of 1 root morpheme and an inflexion (‘law’, ‘warm’, ‘tables’, ‘tenth’).

2. derived words consisting of 1 root morpheme, one or several affixes and an inflexion (‘unmanageable’, ‘lawful’).

3. compound words consisting of 2 or more root morphemes and an inflexion (‘outlaw’, ‘boyfriend’).

4. compound-derived words consisting of 2 or more root morphemes, one or more affixes and an inflexion (‘left-handed’, ‘warm-hearted’).

Out of this we can distinguish 2 main types of word-formation: word-derivation (‘irresistible’, ‘encouragement’, ‘worker’) and word-composition (‘blackboard’, ‘daydream’, ‘weekend’).

The basic ways of forming words in word-derivation are affixation (‘feminist’) and conversion (‘water’ – ‘to water’, ‘to run’ – ‘a run’, ‘slim’ – to ‘slim’).

Affixation

Affixation is divided into suffixation and prefixation. Suffixation is characteristic of noun and adjective formation, while prefixation is typical of verb formation.

Suffixes are classified according to: a) their origin, b) meaning, c) part of speech they form, d) productivity. Prefixes are characterized by: a) their origin, b) meaning, c) productivity.

Coversion

The process of coining anew word in a different part of speech but without adding any derivative element, so that the basic form and derived ones are homonymous, is called conversion. Conversion dates back to the Middle English period. Even though conversion does not add an affix, it is often considered a type of derivation because of the change in category and meaning that it brings about. For this reason conversion is sometimes called zero derivation.

There are 3 most common types of conversion in English:

1. Verb is formed from Noun (‘to butter’)

2. Noun is formed from Verb (‘a survey’, ‘a call’)

3. Verb is formed from Adjective (‘to empty’)

Conversion is usually restricted to words of a single morpheme.