9. Word-Structure in English. Classification of Morphemes. Morphemic types of Words.

Word - the basic unit of language, a minimum meaningful free form. It is a two - faced unity of form (phonetic, graphic) and content (meaning). These 2 facets are inseparable for a definite period of language development, but historically they are changeable. The form of the words is devisible into elements. Phoneme - is a minimum form. Morpheme - it is a minimum lexico - grammatical meaningful form. A morpheme is the smallest indivisible two-facet language unit which implies an association of a certain meaning with a certain sound form. Unlike words, morphemes cannot function independently (they occur in speech only as parts of words).

Classification of Morphemes

• Semantically: 1) root morphemes –lexical nucleous of words (remake, glassful, disorder - make, glass, order- are understood as the lexical centres of the words) It has a very general and abstract lexical meaning which is common to one word family: water - watery - to water - water - melon. 2) non-root – include inflectional (carry only grammatical meaning and relevant only for the formation of word-forms) and affixational morphemes (relevant for building different types of stems).

• Structurally: free morphemes (can act as separate word. friend- of the noun friendship is qualified as a free morpheme), bound morphemes (occurs only as a part of a word. Affixes are bound for they always make part of a word. e.g. the suffixes –ness, -ship, -ize in the words darkness, friendship, to activize; the prefixes im-, dis-, de- in the words impolite, to disregard, to demobilize).semi-free morphemes (can function both as affixes and free morphemes. E.g. well and half on the one hand coincide with the stem – to sleep well, half an hour, and on the other in the words – well-known, half-done).

Affixational morph.:

- derrivational: suff., preff. /worker, botanist/;

- functional (gram-l): /n./ -s,'s; /adj./ -er, est; /v./ - s,-ed,-ing;

Allomorphs - are positional variants of morph.: -root allomorph: please, pleasure, pleasant; - affixal: eatable, addable, -ir, -im, -ill: impossible, irregular.

Morphemic types of words

According to the number of morphemes words maybe classified into: monomorphic (root) words e.g. live, house) and polymorphic words that consist of more than one morpheme (merciless).

Polymorphic: 1.Monoradical (one-root) words may be of 3 subtypes: a) radical-suffixal words-1 root, 1 suffix (helpless), b) radical-prefixal words (mistrust), c) prefixo-radical-suffixal words (misunderstanding). 2. Polyradical (two or more roots) words fall into: a) root morphemes without affixes (bookcase) and b) root morphemes with suffixes (straw-colored).

10. Derivational Structure of the Word. Derivational Bases.

The nature, type and arrangement of the immediate constituents of the word are known as its derivational structure. According to their derivational structure words fall into: simplexes (simple, non-derived words) and complexes (derivatives). Complexes are grouped into: derivatives and compounds. Derivatives fall into: affixational (suffixal and affixal) types and conversions. Complexes constitute the largest class of words. Both morphemic and derivational structure of words is subject to various changes in the course of time.

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

The derivational bases is the part of the word which establishes connections with the lexical unit that motivates the derivative and defines its lexical meaning describing the difference between words in one and the same derivational set. For example, the individual lexical meaning of the words singer, writer. teacher which denote active doers of the action, is signaled by the lexical meaning of the derivational bases: sing-, write-, reach-.

Derivational bases differ from morphological stems both structurally and semantically

A Morphological Stem	A Derivational Base
1) the starting point for the forms of the word (e.g. heart — hearts)	1) the starting point for different words (e.g. heart — hearty, heartless, heartbeat)

Structurally, they fall into 3 classes: 1. bases that coincide with morphological stems (e.g. beautiful (d.b.) - beautifully); 2. bases that coincide with word-forms (e.g. unknown - known); 3. bases that coincide with word groups; adjectives and nouns (e.g. blue-eyed – having blue eyes, easy-going).

• simple stems, which consist of only one constituent, e.g. pocket, motion, retain:

• derived stems girlish

• compound stems match-box letter-writer