1. The problem of morphemes: peculiarities of the morphemic structure of the English word. New approaches to the classification of morphemic structure of the English word.

Word- forms are concrete words that occur in speech and writing e.g. sing, sang, sung.

Then we introduced the segmentation of words into the smallest abstract units of meaning or grammatical function. These units are called morphemes. Morphemes are recurrent, physical, word-forming chunks. Any morphs that represent the same meaning are grouped together as allomorphs of that morpheme. Morphs are listed as allomorphs of the same morpheme. If they are complementary distribution, that is, if they are realizations of the same morpheme in different context.

Word analysis involves breaking a word into its morphemes. The smallest form which is paired with a particular meaning. Language works because human beings can form relationships between forms and meanings. In the examples of "cat" and ""bird," each morpheme was a separate word, but this isn't always the case. We could put the two morphemes together to form the compound word "catbird." Here the forms of the two morphemes have been added together to make a new form unit: a single word having two morphemes. At the same time, the meanings of the two morphemes have been combined to create a new meaning: 'a species of songbird that sounds somewhat like a cat'. We can therefore talk about morphemes that are bound (ie they cannot stand alone, like -ion) and those that a free (ie they can stand alone, like character). The bound morphemes are often those can be attached to the beginnings and endings of other morphemes, and these are affixes – those attached to the beginnings of other morphemes are prefixes and those attached to the endings are suffixes. (Occasionally an affix might be attached to the middle of words, like abso-bloody-lutely: this would be an infix.)

 

Affixes are either derivational or inflectional (also spelt: inflexional). A derivational affixes changes either the meaning or the word class of the original morpheme/word (or both). Thus, -ion, -ation and -iseare derivational morphemes because they change the word class of the words to which they were suffixed (discuss, a verb, becomes discussion, a noun; characterise, a verb, becomes characterisation, a noun;character, a noun, becomes characterise, a verb); anti- is also a derivational morpheme because of the change in meaning (antithesis is different in meaning from thesis). Character, discuss and thesis in the above examples are roots. (The root is the base form of a word which cannot be further analysed without loss of the word’s identity.)

 

If the word class or the essential meaning is not changed, then the affix is inflectional. They can also be called inflections (inflexions) on its own. In English today, we have inflexions for tense (-ed) and aspect (-ing), for person (-(e)s), for plural (-(e)s), for the possessive (’s) and for comparisons (-er, -est). The element of word structure without any inflections is known as the stem. Therefore, the wordcharacterising is made up of characterise (the stem) + ing (inflectional affix). And from the earlier paragraph, we know characterise can be broken up into character (the root) + ise (derivational affix).

Types of morphemes are given dew attention to roots, affixes, stems and bases.

A root is the irreducible core of a word, with absolutely nothing else attached to it. It is the part that must always be present.

An affix is a morpheme that only occurs when attached to some other morpheme or morphemes such as a root or stem or base.

A prefix is an affix attached before a root, stem or base.

A suffix is an affix attached after a root, stem or base.

An infix is an affix inserted inside the root itself.

We have also discussed “the hierarchical structure of words”. We have seen how complex words can be analyzed as roots with attached affixes.

Linguists often use –TREES- to represent hierarchical structure graphically. E.g.

Lexemes are abstract dictionary words like the noun “live” and the verb “learn”. A lexeme is realized by one or more word-forms e.g. “happiness”. Word- forms are concrete words that occur in speech and writing e.g. sing, sang, sung. We also saw that the word ca be viewed as a lexeme associated with a set of morpho-syntactic properties e.g. sings [verb, present, 3-d person, singular]. In this case we are looking at a grammatical word.

Then we introduced the segmentation of words into the smallest abstract units of meaning or grammatical function. These units are called morphemes. Morphemes are recurrent, physical, word-forming chunks. Any morphs that represent the same meaning are grouped together as allomorphs of that morpheme. According to structurelists as (Ch.Fries, H. Whitehall, K.L.Pike, E.nida) meaning plays a role, but the main principle used is that of distribution. Morphs are listed as allomorphs of the same morpheme. If they are complementary distribution, that is, if they are realizations of the same morpheme in different context.

The position N,A and-ness in the tree above are ‘nodes’, -ness is a terminal node.

Another way that the structure of a word can be represented is with the ‘labeled bracketing”. E.g. “ un-happi-ness-es”

[N[N[A-UN[A HAPPY]-NESS]-ES]

Classification of Morphemes