Recommended Literature:

1. Арнольд И.В. Лексикология современного английского языка. .= The English Word [Текст]: Учебн. для ин-тов и фак. иностр. яз. 3-е изд., перераб. и доп. / И.В. Арнольд. – М.: Высшая школа,1986. – c. 182– 193.

2. Гинзбург, Р.З. Лексикология английского языка [Текст]: Учебн для ин-тов и фак. иностр. яз. / Р.З. Гинзбург, С.С. Хидекель, Г.Ю. Князева и др.– М.: Высшая школа,1979. – p. 39 – 46.

3. Антрушина Г.Б. Лексикология английского языка = English Lexicology [Текст]: Учеб. для студ. пед.ин-тов по спец. №.2103 «Иностр. яз.» /Г.Б. Антрушина, О.В. Афанасьева, Н.Н. Морозова – 3-е изд. стереотип. – М.: Дрофа, 2001 – с.128 – 141.

4. Арбекова Т.И. Лексикология английского языка (практический курс) [Текст]. Учебное пособие для студентов 2-3 курсов институтов и факультетов иностранных языков./ Т.И. Арбекова. – М.: Высшая школа, 1977. – с. 137 – 143.

5.Малаховский Л.В. Словарь английских омонимов и омоформ: около 9 тысяч омонимических рядов. – М.: Рус.яз..1995. – 624 с..

6. Смирницкий А.И. Лексикология английского языка [Текст] / А.И. Смирницкий – М.: Изд-во МГУ им. М.В. Ломоносова, 1998 .– с159 – 174.

Lecture 8. Morphological Structure of English Words

1. Morphemes. Classification of Morphemes.

2. Types of Meaning in Morphemes.

3. Morphemic Types of Words.

4. Types of Word-Segmentability.

5. Procedure of Morphemic Analysis.

According to the number of morphemes words are classified into: monomorphic and polymorphic. The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of the language. It occurs in speech only as a constituent part of words, not independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Morphemes may have different phonetic shapes. All the representations of the given morpheme are called allomorphs or morpheme variants.

Structurally morphemes fall into three types: free morphemes, bound morphemes and semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes. According to the role morphemes play in the constructing words, they are subdivided into roots and affixes. Roots are main morphemic vehicles of a given idea in a given language at a given stage of its development. Affixes are further subdivided, according to their position into prefixes, suffixes and infixes.

Semantically morphemes may have different types of meaning depending on the semantic class to which they belong. Root-morphemes possess lexical, differential and distributional types of meaning. The stem expresses the lexical and the part of speech meaning. Stems may be simple or derived. Affixes have lexical, part-of-speech, differential and distributional types of meaning.

As in words lexical meaning in morphemes may also be analyzed into denotative and connotative components. Differential meaning is the semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from all others containing identical morphemes. Distributional meaning is the meaning of the order and arrangement of morphemes making up the word.

Three types of morphemic segmentability of words are distinguished: complete, conditional, defective. Complete segmentability is characteristic of a great number of words, the morphemic structure of which is transparent.

There are two levels of approach to the study of word-structure: the level of morphemic analysis and the level of derivational (or word-formational) analysis. The morphemic analysis establishes only the morphemes that make up the word, regardless of their role in the formation of this or that word. The morphemic analysis only defines the constituent morphemes but does not reveal the hierarchy of morphemes comprising a word. The analysis into immediate constituents permits to obtain the morphemic structure and provides the basis for further word-formation analysis.