ГОС_1 / Lexicology / Lecture4 / Morphemes

Morphemes, types of morphemes in English.

As the biggest units of morphology, words are made up of smaller units – morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest, indivisible meaningful language unit within the structure of a word.

Like a word, a morpheme is a two-faced language unit. It means that a morpheme has a certain meaning & a certain sound-pattern.

But unlike a word, a morpheme is not autonomous, it can occur in speech only as a constituent part of a word.

According to their meaning & the role they play in constructing words, morphemes are:

• Root morphemes (roots);

• Affixational morphemes (affixes).

The root morpheme is a lexical nuclears, the semantic centre of the word, it has a concrete lexical meaning & is a common part of a word-building cluster.

The word-building cluster is a group of words with one & the same root morpheme, linked through synchronic derivational relations.

e.g. dog – doggy – doggish – doggedness – to dog

The root morpheme possesses all types of meaning: lexical, differential (bookshelf - bookcase) & distributional meaning (order of arrangement meaning – e.g. boyishness), except the part of speech meaning.

According to the opposition, affixes are:

• Prefixes, which proceed the root;

• Suffixes, which follow the root;

• Infixes, placed within the root.

Infixes are very rare in the English language: e.g. to stand.

According to their function & meaning, affixes are subdivided into:

• Grammatical affixes (suffixes);

• Derivational affixes (suffixes & preffixes).

Grammatical affixes or functional affixes, inflectional morphemes, inflections or endings serve to form new grammar forms of the same word & are studied in Grammar.

Derivational affixes serve to build new words & are studied in Lexicology. The lexical meaning of affixational morphemes is of more generalising character than that of root morphemes.

E.g. –er → agent; -less – without

All in all, we have about 200 derivative affixes.

Structurally morphemes fall into free & bound morphemes. Free are root morphemes, which coincide with separate words. Bound are all derivational affixes & inflections & root morphemes which do not coincide with separate words. E.g. horr- (horrible); angl- (Anglo-saxon).

There is a group of so-called semi-free or semi-bound morphemes (semi-affixes) which may function both as root morphemes (-man in manmade, manservant) & as derivational elements (-man in gentleman, cabman, etc).

e.g. – like (lady-like...); -proof (waterproof, kissproof).

Affixes should not be confused with the so-called combining forms – bound root morphemes of Greek & Latin origin, which occur in compounds & derivatives mostly international terms, formed in modern times (telephone, telegraph, etc.) but some of them begin a new life as semi-affixes (-cide “kill” (L.) in suicide today is used in autocide or biocide).

A morpheme may have several positional, phonetic & graphical variants or representations called allomorphs (please, pleasant, pleasure [pli:z – plezent – ple e]. These 3 variants are allomorphs of one & the same morpheme.The allomorphs of the negative prefixes “in” are “il+l” (illegal), “im + biabils” (impossible), “ir+r” (irregular).

The main structural types of English words.

According to their morphological (derivational) structure, there are 4 main types of words in English:

• Root words or simple or primary, consisting of 1 morpheme only ( the root)

e.g. go, come, nose, table, good

• Derivatives or derived words consisting of 2 or more morphemes – usually the roots & some affixes are attached to it.

e.g. unbreakable

• Compounds, consisting of 2 or more stems

e.g. feedback, blackmail

• Compound derivatives consisting of 2 or more stems with a derivational morpheme, added at the end.

e.g. long-nosed, double-decker