11. Word and morpheme as basic notions of Morphology.

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit. 'Un-fail-ing-ly', for instance, contains four meaningful parts or four morphemes.

The word is the smallest naming unit. Though the words 'terror', 'terrible', 'terrific', 'terrify' contain more than one morpheme each, they are the smallest units naming a certain feeling, certain properties, and a certain action respectively.The sentence is the smallest communication unit. 'It rains' is a sentence because it contains a communication.

The phoneme, the morpheme, the word and the sentence are units of different levels of language structure. The phoneme is a unit of the lowest level, the sentence- of the highest. At the same time the morpheme and the word are basic notions of Morphology while the sentence and the phrase are the basic notions of Syntax.

One of the main properties of a word is its double nature. It is material because it can be heard or seen, and it is immaterial or ideal as far as its meaning is concerned. The material aspect of the word is regarded as its form, and its meanings as its content. When defining the word as 'the smallest naming unit'we refer primarily to its content, whereas pointing out the most characteristic features of words we deal chiefly with the form.

The word 'books' can be broken up in two parts: 'book1 and '-s\ The content of the first part can be rendered by the Russian 'книг-' and the meaning of the second part is 'plurality'. So each part of the word 'books' has both form and content. Such meaningful parts of a word are called morphemes. If we break up the word 'books' in some other way, e.g. 'boo-ks', the resulting parts will not be morphemes, since they have no meanings.

The morpheme 'book'- and '-s' greatly differ in following:

a. in their relations to reality and thought. 'Book'- is directly associated

with some object of reality. The morpheme -s is connected with the

world of reality only indirectly, through the morpheme it is linked

with. In combination with the morpheme 'book; it means' more than one book'.

b. In their relations to the word of which they are parts. 'Book'- is

more independent than -s. We can say that 'book'- makes a word with

a zero morpheme. It always depends on some positive morpheme, (here 'book-').

c. In their relations to similar morphemes in other words. The meaning

of '-s' is always relative. In the word 'books' it denotes ' plurality',

because 'books' is opposed to 'book' with the zero morpheme of

'singularity'. Or, to take another example, the morpheme '-s' in

'wants' shows the meaning of 'present tense' in relation to the morpheme 'wanted', but it shows the meaning of 'third person,

singular' in relation to the zero morpheme of 'want'.

12. The Numeral. Classification of Numerals.

A numeral is a member of a word class (or a subclass of determiners) designating numbers, such as the English word 'two' and the compound 'seventy-seven'.

Numerals may be attributive, as in two dogs, or pronominal, as in I saw two (of them).

Many words of different parts of speech indicate number or quantity. Quantifiers do not enumerate, or designate a specific number, but give another, often less specific, indication of amount. Examples are words such as every, most, least, some, etc. There are also number words which enumerate but are not a distinct part of speech, such as 'dozen', which is a noun, 'first', which is an adjective, or 'twice', which is an adverb. Numerals enumerate, but in addition have distinct grammatical behavior: when a numeral modifies a noun, it may replace the article: the/some dogs played in the park → twelve dogs played in the park. (Note that *dozen dogs played in the park is not grammatical, so 'dozen' is not a numeral.)

Numerals may be simple, such as 'eleven', or compound, such as 'twenty-three'. They indicate cardinal numbers. Various other number words are derived from numerals, but are not themselves numerals. Examples are ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc.; from 'third' up, these are also used for fractions) and multiplicative adverbs (once, twice, and thrice).

In other languages, there may be other kinds of words derived from numerals. For example, in Slavic languages there are collective numbers which describe sets, such as pair or dozen in English. (See Polish numerals.) Georgian[1] and Latin have distributive numbers, such as Latin singuli "one-by-one", bini "in pairs, two-by-two", terni "three each", etc.

Some languages have a very limited set of numerals, and in some cases they arguably do not have any numerals at all, but instead use more generic quantifiers or number words, such as 'pair' or 'many'. However, by now most such languages have borrowed the numeral system or part of the numeral system of a national or colonial language, though in a few cases (such as Guarani), a numeral system has been invented internally rather than borrowed. Other languages had an indigenous system but borrowed a second set of numerals anyway. An example is Japanese, which uses either native or Chinese-derived numerals depending on what is being counted.

In many languages, such as Chinese, numerals require the use of numeral classifiers. Many sign languages, such as ASL, incorporate numerals.

There are simple numerals (1-12), derivative numerals (13-19) and composite numerals (for example: 21, 67, 147).

There are cardinal and ordinal numerals in the English language.

1) Cardinal numerals show the number of certain items. They correspond to the interrogative word “How many?”

2) Ordinal numerals are used to show the order of items. They correspond to the question starting with the word “Which?”

Example:

Such words as “a hundred”, “a thousand” and “a million” are nouns, not numerals. If these words are used in a singular form, they always go with the indefinite article “a” or the numeral “one”.

Let’s give some examples:

These words are not used with the plural ending:

Still, the following words could have the plural ending:

Thus, words “a hundred”, “a thousand” and “a million” could have the plural ending, if they are followed with the “of” preposition and a noun.

3) In a sentence numbers are usually used as attributes.

4) Numerals could have any function in a sentence if they don’t have any defined words.