Essentials of Morphology

Aim: to lead the students to a scientific understanding of the questions of Morphology as the part of Grammar.

Professional Orientation: to enable the prospective teachers to properly understand the grammatical level of the English language.

Main notions: Morphology, the grammatical form, the grammatical meaning, the grammatical paradigm, the grammatical category.

Lecture Plan

1. Morphology as part of grammar.

2. Morphemic structure of the word.

3. The Stem.

4. The grammatical form, the grammatical meaning, the grammatical paradigm, the grammatical category.

5. Morphological means of expressing grammatical meanings.

Methods: interactive.

Questions for individual studying:

1. What levels does the hierarchy of linguistic levels consist of?

2. What is language system and speech?

3. What basic units of language and speech do you know?

4. What is the grammatical opposition? What types of grammatical oppositions do you know?

5. What are the explicit and implicit categories? Name some of them.

Self-control Questions:

1. What parts does grammar consist of?

2. What does morphology study?

3. What does syntax study?

4. How do you understand the statement "a word has a double nature"?

5. What is "the morpheme"?

6. What is "the root"?

7. What types of affixes do you know?

8. What is "the lexical morpheme" ?

9. What is "the grammatical morpheme" ?

10. What is "the stem" ? What types of stem do English words have?

11. What is "the grammatical form"?

12. What is "the grammatical meaning" ?

13. What is "the grammatical paradigm" ?

14. What is "the grammatical category" ?

Literature Recommended

1. Иванова И.П., Бурлакова В.В., Почепцов Г.Г. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка. – Москва: Высшая школа, 1981. – С. 4-14.

2. Blokh M.Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar. – Москва: Высшая школа, 1983. – С. 17-36.

3. Ilyish В. The Structure of Modern English. – Ленинград: Просвещение, 1971. – C. 21-26.

4. Khaimovich B.S., Rogovskaya B.l. A Course in English Grammar. Москва: Высшая школа, 1987. – С. 11-31.

   1. Grammar consists of two parts: morphology and syntax. Morphology treats of the forms of words. Syntax treats of phrases and sentences.

   2. A word has a double nature: on the one hand, it has a material form /as it can be heard or seen/, on the other hand, it has its meaning /its content/, which is immaterial, ideal. The word is a nominative unit of language; it is formed by morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful parts of a word. In accord with the traditional classification, morphemes fall into roots /common parts of words belonging to different parts of speech/ and affixes, which include prefixes and suffixes. English prefixes are word-forming. English suffixes are of two types: word-forming /lexical/ and form-forming /grammatical. In the tradition of the English school form-forming /grammatical/ suffixes are called “inflexions”, “endings”.

Lexical morphemes are associated with reality directly; they are roots, word-forming suffixed and prefixes. Grammatical morphemes are connected with the world of reality indirectly, through the morpheme they are linked with.

3. The stem includes all lexical morphemes: roots, prefixes and word- forming suffixes. As for their structure, stems may be:

• simple, containing only the root: pen, go, red, fast, in, and;

• derivative, containing roots, prefixes and word-forming suffixes: reader, enrich, boyish, quickly;

• compound, containing two or more roots /apple-tree, whitewash/; the stems like “warm-hearted” are both compound and derivative and are sometimes called “compound derivatives”;

• composite, having the form of a combination of words: put on, in front of.

  4. The grammatical form is the form of a word in a concrete sentence- utterance. The grammatical meaning is very abstract, very general; it is expressed by grammatical morphemes. For example, the word "boy" has different forms in different sentences:

"The boy is 10 years old" (the Common Case, Singular);

"The boys are 10 and 12 years old" (the Common Case, Plural);

"The boy's father is 45 years old" (the Possessive Case, Singular);

"The boys' father is 45 years old." (the Possessive Case, Plural).

The grammatical paradigm is the ordered set of grammatical forms, which are united by the common part of their grammatical meanings (the generalized grammatical meaning) and opposed to each other by different aspects of their grammatical meanings. The correlated elements /the members of the paradigm/ possess two types of features: common features and differential features. For example:

Boy – Singular Number

Boys – Plural Number

The word "number" points out the common part of the grammatical meanings of these two word-forms. It is the generalized grammatical meaning, which unites these two forms within one paradigm.

The words "singular" and "plural" points out the differential features of these two forms, which make the forms opposite within one paradigm.

The above paradigm represents the grammatical category of number.

The grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms.

4. Morphological means of expressing grammatical meanings are within the grammatical forms of words, which are classed into synthetical and analytical.

Synthetical grammatical forms are based on:

• inner inflexion (or phonemic/vowel interchange): man-men; foot- feet; run-ran; swim-swam;

• outer inflexion( or grammatical suffixation): reads, played; bigger;

• suppletivity/forms of the same word have different roots/: go-went, be-was/were; good-better; badly-worse.

Analytical grammatical form presents a combination of an auxiliary word with a basic word.

Words like "walks", with bound grammatical morphemes, are called synthetical words. They are words both in form and in meaning.

Words like "will work" are called analytical. They are words in meaning. In form they combinations of words.

The grammatical meaning of an analytical form is made up by the whole combination of all the components, making up this form. For example:

2. is done – the Passive Voice, the Present Indefinite Tense;

is doing – the Present Continuous Tense, the Active Voice;

3. will have done – the Future Perfect Tense, the Active Voice;

have been done – the Present Perfect Tense, the Passive Voice.

In the first example the same form of the auxiliary verb "to be" /is/ is used in the forms having different grammatical meanings /is done, is doing/

In the second example the same Participle 2 /done/ is used in the forms with different grammatical meanings/will have done, have been done/.