3. Problems connected with the notion of a morpheme

Though the notion of a morpheme is recognized by linguists it does not deprive this phenomenon of a number of disputable issues. Thus L. Bloomfield defines the morpheme as a recurrent meaningful elementary linguistic unit. The question which arises is, what is meaningful? In this case, the reference to the famous cranberry morph has become traditional. “Words such as blueberry, blackberry, cloudberry, cranberry etc. are clearly compounds of berry, but what does cran mean?” [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 227]. Compare the following words: disarrange, disorganize ↔ discuss, discern, disappoint. According to the formal criterion, dis- should be recognized as a morpheme. But in the second set it is devoid of the meaning it has in the first set. Bolinger and after him Haas (1960) also emphasized the difficulty of trying to identify morphemes on a purely formal (distributional) basis: cat in pussycat / cattle, re- in religion / recall. Thus, the question arises whether it should be only distribution which is to be taken into account. Traditionally these morphemes are called quasi morphemes.

The next questionable area is the so-called zero morpheme. Some linguists seriously challenge the viability of zero as a linguistic element. Haas calls zero allomorphs “ghostly components” and Matthews (1974) says incisively “one cannot examine one’s data and determine the distribution of zero”. I.B. Khlebnikova adds more arguments against the notion of a zero morpheme. She points out that the absence of a morpheme is too universal a phenomenon in English to call for special consideration [Хлебникова 2001: 6]. Nevertheless there is a compromise approach to this issue. Thus, grammarians give a peculiar interpretation to the difference between the zero morpheme and the unmarked grammatical form. For instance, the absence of the morpheme of plurality of countable nouns testifies to the fact that the noun is used in the singular. But when it comes to mass nouns (air, wheat, courage, etc.) which do not normally take the plural inflection it seems odd to suggest that they have a zero morpheme. Then, in this case it is more preferable to speak about the singular of nouns as the unmarked categorial form [Kroeger 2006: 18].

I.B. Khlebnikova also believes that L. Bloomfield’s definition of a morpheme as “a minimal meaningful unit” is defective as “it does not specify what kind of meaning is understood and it does not mark out the difference between form-building and word-building morphemes” [Хлебникова 2001: 6].

Another shaky ground is the distinction between suffixes and inflexions. In the broad sense suffixes can cover inflexions and derivation (for instance in the Handbook of Linguistics edited by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller the element “s” at the end of the form cats is referred to as a suffix [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 213]). In the narrower sense suffixes can only be derivational and an inflexion is not a special kind of suffix but a morpheme of a different kind having no lexical meaning of its own. This approach is taken by B.A. Ilyish who insists on two distinct terms for these notions. Recognizing different nature of inflections and suffixes, but to some extent following the deeply rooted tradition to use the term suffix to cover all the morphemes placed after the root, some English-speaking grammarians find it convenient to stick to the terms derivational affixes and inflectional affixes [Kroeger 2006: 252]. Thus they refer to different morphological functions these linguistic entities perform.