5. Distributional analysis in morphology; contrastive/non-contrastive/complementary types of distribution. Distributional classification of morphemes

The “allo-emic theory” in the study of morphemes was developed within the framework of Descriptive Linguistics by means of the so-called distributional analysis: in the first stage of distributional analysis a syntagmatic chain of lingual units is divided into meaningful segments, morphs, e.g.: he/ start/ed/ laugh/ing/; then the recurrent segments are analyzed in various textual environments, and the following three types of distribution are established: contrastive distribution, non-contrastive distribution and complementary distribution.

- The morphs are said to be in contrastive distribution if they express different meanings in identical environments e.g.: He started laughing – He starts laughing; such morphs constitute different morphemes.

- The morphs are said to be in non-contrastive distribution if they express identical meaning in identical environments; such morphs constitute ‘free variants’ of the same morpheme, e.g.: learned - learnt, ate [et] – ate [eit], either [iðer] - either [aiðer] (in Russian: трактора – тракторы).

- The morphs are said to be in complementary distribution if they express identical meanings in different environments, e.g.: He started laughing – He stopped laughing; such morphs constitute variants, or allo-morphs of the same morpheme.

The allo-morphs of the plural morpheme -(e)s [s], [z], [iz] stand in phonemic complementary distribution; the allo-morph –en, as in oxen, stands in morphemic complementary distribution with the other allo-morphs (-(e)s [s], [z], [iz]) of the plural morpheme.

Besides these traditional types of morphemes, in Descriptive Linguistics six distributional morpheme types are distinguished; they immediately correlate with each other in the following pairs.

1) Free morphemes, which can build up words by themselves, are opposed to bound morphemes, used only as parts of words; e.g.: in the word ‘hands’ hand- is a free morpheme and -s is a bound morpheme.

2) Overt and covert morphemes are opposed to each other: the covert shows the meaningful absence of a morpheme distinguished in the opposition of grammatical forms in paradigms; it is also known as the “zero morpheme”, e.g.: in the number paradigm of the noun, hand – hands, the plural is built with the help of an overt morpheme, hand-s, while the singular - with the help of a zero or covert morpheme, handØ.

3) Full or meaningful morphemes are opposed to empty morphemes, which have no meaning and are left after singling out the meaningful morphemes; some of them used to have a certain meaning, but lost it in the course of historical development, e.g.: in the word ‘children’ child- is the root of the word, bearing the core of the meaning, -en is the suffix of the plural, while -r- is an empty morpheme, having no meaning at all, the remnant of an old morphological form.

4) Segmental morphemes, consisting of phonemes, are opposed to supra-segmental morphemes, which leave the phonemic content of the word unchanged, but the meaning of the word is specified with the help of various supra-segmental lingual units, e.g.: `convert (a noun) - con`vert (a verb).

5) Additive (додані) morphemes, which are freely combined in a word, e.g.: look+ed, small+er, are opposed to replacive (замінювані) morphemes, or root morphemes, which replace each other in paradigms, e.g.: sing - sang - sung.

6) Continuous morphemes, combined with each other in the same word, e.g.: worked, are opposed to discontinuous morphemes, which consist of two components used jointly to build the analytical forms of the words, e.g.: have worked, is working.

Many of the distributional morpheme types contradict the traditional definition of the morpheme: traditionally the morpheme is the smallest meaningful lingual unit (this is contradicted by the “empty” morphemes type), built up by phonemes (this is contradicted by the “supra-segmental” morphemes type), used to build up words (this is contradicted by the “discontinuous” morphemes type). This is due to the fact that in Descriptive Linguistics only three lingual units are distinguished: the phoneme, the morpheme, and syntactic constructions; the notion of the word is rejected because of the difficulties of defining it. Still, the classification of distributional morpheme types can be used to summarize and differentiate various types of word-building and word-changing, though not all of them are morphemic in the current mainstream.

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