2. Morphological structure of the word (phonemes, morphemes, types of

morphemes)

A word can be divided into certain constituent parts. These constituent parts of the word are called morphemes. Morphemes have a particular meaning which is associated with a certain sound pattern. Morphemes can’t be divided into smaller meaningful units. Thus a morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a word.

Morphemes can be either bound or free. They are set to be free if they occur in speech alone without changing theit meaning. They coincde with separatewords they are root morphemes. (boy, dog, table) Bound morphemes never occur in speech alone. They always bound to smth else. They do not coincde with words. They are all derivational (образ-е) affixed (ful, less, dis). According to the role they play in constructing words morphemes are subdivided into roots and affixes. And according to their position affixes are subdivided into prefixes and suffixes (and infixes). According to their functions and meanings: derivational(form words) and functional()help to form grammatical forms.

When an affix is removed from the word what remains is stem. The stem expresses the lexical and part-of-speech meaning. The stem is the part of the word that remains unchanged through out its paradigm. The stem may take inflexions and derivational affixes. They may be simple stems and polimorphic or derived stems. (boyish, boyishness). The root morpheme is a lexical nucleus of the word. Root has a more general lexical meaning. It possesses all types of meanings except part-of-speech meaning. Affixes are always bound forms. An affix is a derivational morpheme which follows the atem and forms a new differnt part of speech. (Ex: heart, to hearten, hearty). A prefix is a derivational morpheme standing before the stem and modifying (определяет) meaning. (Ex: to hearten – to dishearten). Preceeding a word stem some prefixes express the difference between a transitive(переходный) and intransitive words. (Ex: to stay остаться – to outstay пересидеть в гостях transitive). Prefixes modify the stem form (Ex: time – pre; place – in, out; negation – un, dis, e t c.) They remain semantically rather independent of the stem.

To sum it up we can say that examination of morphemic structure of english words shows that they are composed of morphemes of different types. Root morphemes & affixational morphemes: the root morpheme is a basic unchangable part which has lexical meaning. They have no part-of-speech meaning. They are always free morphemes. Affixational morphemes include inflexional affixes (inflexions) and derivational affixes. Derivational affixes have part-of-speech meaning. In some affixational morphemes part-of-speech meaning prevails. (Ex: -ment is a nounforming suffix; -less is a adjective forming suffix). Inflexions carry only grammatical meaning and they are relevant only for the formation of word forms. Derivational affixes are relevant for different types of words. They are lexically dependent on the root. They modify and change the meaning of the root, they create new words. They are as a rule bound morphemes.

Meaning of morphemes. Morphemes may have lexical meaning. Besides lexical meaning they have differentional, functional and distributional meanings. Diffrerntional meaning helps to differentiate 1 word from the other. (Ex: bookshelf – bookcase – notebook; deceive – receive – conceive – perceive; refain - detain). In these words the morphemes –re, -de, -con, -per are called pseudo morphemes. They are set apart from other types of morphemes because they lack lexical meaning, they have only differentional & distributional meanings. Functional meaning is one that shows what part of speech a word belongs to: heart – to hearten. The meaning that is brought about by arrangement of morphemes shows the meaning. It should be noted that morphemes may have different phonetic representatioin (please, pleasure, pleasant). Here the root morpheme is represented by the following phonetic. All the representations of the given morpheme that manifest a change are called allomorphs of the morphemes or morpheme variants. Thus morpheme variants are called allomorphs.