lexicology / 34-35

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International words may refer to different fields of life and human activities but they mostly express scientific, cultural, technical and political concepts.

e.g. physics, formula, dynamo, tuberculosis, logarithm, class, constitution

The bulk of international words in English are borrowed from Latin and Greek or made up from Greek and Latin elements.

There are also internationalisms of English origin which have penetrated into most European languages, especially in the vocabulary of politics and sports.

e.g. leader, meeting, football, tennis

Questions for Self-Control

1 What arc the main characteristics of native words?

2. What is the classification of loan words according to the degree of assimilation?

3. What are translation loans? What are the main sources of translation loans?

4. What criteria of borrowings do you know?

5. What are etymological doublets?

Practical Task

Exercise 1. Can you match each of the words in the list above with the language (in the list below) it originally came from? What helps you match them?

1. kayak	2. spaghetti	3. algebra
4. juggernaut	5. kebab	6. hamburger
7. glasnost	8. robot	9. corgi
10. kung fu	11. karate	12. crocodile
13. sombrero	14. chipmunk	15. bossa nova

a) Russian, b) Japanese, c) Spanish, d) Italian, e) German, 0 Hindi, g) Portuguese, h) French, i) Inuit, j) Welsh, k) Chinese, I) Arabic, m) Czech, n) Turkish, o) American Indian

MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS

4.1. The Morpheme. Definition

We distinguish a word as an autonomous unit of language in which a

particular meaning is associated with a particular sound complex from the

other fundamental language units, namely, the morpheme.

A morpheme is also an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of word, not independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Morphemes are not divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is why the morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful language unit (18).

The term 'morpheme' is derived from Greek "morphe* form, and 'erne' the smallest significant unit

4.2. Principles of Morphemic Analysis

Morphemic analysis is the operation of breaking a segmentable word into the constituent morphemes. We distinguish three types of morphemic segmentability: complete, conditional and defective.

Complete scgmantability is characteristic of a great many words the morphemic structure of which is transparent enough, as their individual morphemes clearly stand out. The transparency is explained by the fact that its constituent morphemes recur with the same meaning in a number of other words.

e.g. boiling, boiler, boil

teacher, painter, speaker

There are, however, many words in English the morphemic structure of which is not so transparent and easy to establish as in the cases mentioned above.

Conditional morphemic segmentability characterizes words whose segmentation into constituent morphemes is doubtful for semantic reasons. In words like 'retain-contain-detain’ or 'resist-consist-desist', the sound clusters [rI] - [dI] - [ken] seem, on the one hand, to be singled out quite easily, on the other hand, they have nothing in common with the phonetically identical morphemes 're-* and de-' as found in the words: rewrite, reorganize; deorganise, decode, etc. Neither the sound clusters