Notion of the morpheme.
Morpheme – is one of the central notions of grammatical theory, without which no serious attempt at grammatical study can be made. Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of the language.
There may be zero morphemes that is the absence of morpheme. It indicates certain meanings (book-books). Zero morphemes indicate singular form, s-morpheme - plurality.
In traditional grammar the study of the morpheme was conducted in the light of 2 criteria (positional and semantic). The combination of these criteria gives us a classification of morphemes.
According to their position morphemes can be prepositional (prefix), central (root)and postpositional (suffixes and inflexions).
Traditionally the following types of morphemes are distinguished:
Root morphemes Affixal morphemes (affixes)
- prefixes
- suffixes
- inflections ( grammatical suffixes)
Prefixes, root-morphemes, lexical suffixes are lexical morphemes in English.
Only grammatical suffixes (inflections) are form-building means in English.
(Russian suffixes and prefixes are form-building)
It's necessary to distinguish between form-building and word-building means. Word-building means express notions.
e.g. work – worker –> -er – lexical suffix
workable –> -able – lex. suffix
They build new words, they're treated in Lexicology.
Form-building means are means of building up new forms of words. They are treated in grammar (morphology).
Both form-building and word-building affixes can be:
productive non-productive
-er; -or; -ent; -ness -dom; -hood (lex. suffixes)
-(e)s; -(e)d; -ing; -er, -est -en; -em (grammatical suffixes)
Both word-building and form-building suffixes can be polysemantic: e.g. -ly (lex. suff) can build adj, adv. => loudly – adv.; friendly – adj.
-s (es) (grammatical suff.) forms plural/singular of nouns + possessive case.
According to semantic criteria roots are the bearers of meaning. Prefix and suffixes-have lexico-semantic function. Inflexions have no lexical meaning or function, however an inflexion morpheme can get a lexical meaning in some special cases (colour-colours // custom-customs)-lexicalization.
There are some cases when one and the same morpheme may function as an inflexion and suffix (morpheme-ing-as a suffix deriving verbal nouns has inflexion forming gerund/non-finite verbal forms.
Suffix is a morpheme coming after the root, it may be applied to derivation post root morpheme. Inflexion is any morpheme deriving a form of a word and having no lexical meaning. Inflexion is a morpheme expressing case and number in nouns and person and number in verbs.
Morphemes can be:
-free and bound. Bound morphemes cannot form words by themselves, they are identified only as component segmental parts of words. On the contrary, free morphemes can build up words by themselves, i.e. can be used “freely”. e.g. handful – the root hand is a free morpheme, the suffix –ful is a bound morpheme.
-overt and covert. Overt morphemes are genuine, explicit morphemes building up words; the covert morpheme is identified as a contrastive absence of morpheme expressing a certain function. The notion of covert morpheme coincides with the notion of zero morpheme in the oppositional description of grammatical categories.
e.g. clock-s - 2 morphemes (a lexical morpheme and a grammatical one)
clock-Ø – 2 morphemes (the overt root and the covert (implicit) zero morpheme Ø)
-segmental and suprasegmental. Supra-segmental morphemes are intonation contours, accents, pauses.
-additive. Additive morphemes are outer grammatical suffixes, as they are opposed to the absence of morphemes in grammatical alternation: e.g. look-ed; small-er.
On the basis of linear characteristics, “continuous (linear)” morphemes and “discontinuous” morphemes are distinguished.
The discontinuous morpheme is a 2-element grammatical unit, which is the analytical from comprising an auxiliary word and a grammatical suffix:
e.g. be … ing – is going (continuous)
have … en – has gone (perfect)
be … en – is taken (passive)
Continuous morpheme is uninterruptedly expressed.