10.Greek borrowings. Features of Greek borrowings.

The Renaissance Period. In England, as in all European countries, this period was marked by significant developments in science, art and culture and, also, by a revival of interest in the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome and their languages. Hence, there occurred a considerable number of Latin and Greek borrowings. In contrast to the earliest Latin borrowings (1st с. В. С.), the Renaissance ones were rarely concrete names. They were mostly abstract words (e. g. major, minor, filial, moderate, intelligent, permanent, to elect, to create). There were naturally numerous scientific and artistic terms (datum, status, phenomenon, philosophy,method, music).1 The same is true of Greek Renaissance borrowings (e. g. atom, cycle, ethics, esthete).

Features of Greek loans:

ch [k]: chemistry, character;

ph [f]: phenomenon, physics, phonetics;

th [θ]: theme, theatre, myth;

ps [s]: pseudonym, psychic;

rh [r]: rhythm, rhetor;

y /i/ in interconsonantal and final positions: system, physics, comedy;

ae: encyclopaedia ‘training in a circle,’ i.e. the ‘circle’ of arts and sciences, the essentials of a liberal education; from enkyklios ‘circular,’ also ‘general’ (from en ‘in’ + kyklos ‘circle’) + paideia ‘education, child-rearing’;

11. The morphemic structure of English words. Types of morphemes. The principles of morphemic analysis.

Morphology is a branch of linguistics which studies the form, inner structure, function, and patterns of occurrence of a morpheme as the smallest meaningful unit of language.

A morpheme (Gr. morphé ‘form, shape’) is one of the fundamental units of a language, a minimum sign that is an association of a given meaning with a given form (sound and graphic), e.g. old, un+happy, grow+th, blue+colour+ed.

Depending on the number of morphemes, words are divided into:

monomorphic are root-words consisting of only one root-morpheme, i.e. simple words, e.g. to grow, a book, white, fast etc.

polymorphic are words consisting of at least one root-morpheme and a number of derivational affixes, i.e. derivatives, compounds, e.g. good-looking, employee, blue-eyed etc.

Baudouin de Courtenay Ivan Alexandrovich (the Kazan school of linguistics; was the first in world linguistics to investigate the morphological structure of the word):

introduced a number of linguistic terms, including a morpheme (in 1881), a phoneme, a lexeme, a syntagm etc. The Greek suffix –eme has been adopted to denote the smallest significant or distinctive unit.

Types of Morphemes

An allomorph (a morphemic variant) (Gr. állos ‘different’ and morphé ‘form, shape’) is a phonetically conditioned positional variant of the same derivational or functional morpheme identical in meaning and function and differing in sound only insomuch, as their complementary distribution produces various phonetic assimilation effects, e.g. please /pli:z/ pleasure /pleʒ/ pleasant /plez/.

Complementary distribution takes place when two linguistic variants cannot appear in the same environment, e.g. in-competent, il-logical, ir-responsible, im-possible; cat-s.

Contastive distribution characterises different morphemes occurring in the same linguistic environment, but signaling different meanings, e.g. –able in measurable .

A pseudo-morpheme (a quasi-morpheme) is a morpheme which has a differential meaning and a distributional meaning but does not possess any lexical or functional (part-of-speech) meaning, e.g. re- and -tain in retain, con- and –ceive in conceive etc.

A unique morpheme is an isolated pseudo-morpheme which does not occur in other words but is understood as meaningful because the constituent morphemes display a more or less clear denotational meaning, e.g. ham- in hamlet (cf. booklet, ringlet).

Structural Classification of Morphemes : free morphemes are morphemes which coincide with a word-form of an independently functioning word; they can be found only among roots, e.g. hero- as in heroism.

bound morphemes are morphemes which do not coincide with a separate word-form; they include all affixes, e.g. de- as in decode; some root-morphemes, e.g. docu- as in document;

semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes are morphemes which stand midway between a root and an affix; they can function as an independent full-meaning word and an affix at the same time, e.g. to speak ill of sb – to be ill-dressed / ill-bred / ill-fed;

Semi-prefixes: half-, mini-, midi-, maxi-, self-, by- etc.; Semi-suffixes: -man, -like, -proof, -friendly, -oriented, -ware etc.

Morphemic analysis (What do words consist of?) is the analysis limited to stating the number and types of morphemes that make up a word regardless of their role in the formation of this word, viz. it only defines the morphemes comprising a word, but does not reveal their hierarchy.