4. Notion of the morpheme. Types of morpheme. Suffixes and inflexions. Types of word-form derivation.

Morpheme – the smallest meaningful part of a word expressing a generalized, significative meaning. It’s a group of allomorphs that are semantically similar and in complementary distribution.

Allomorphs – 1) a concrete manifestation of a morpheme, a variant, an alternative of a morpheme 2) family of morphs which are alike in 2 ways: in the allophones of which they are composed, in the meaning which they have 3) class of morphs which are phonemically and semantically identical, they have the same phonemes in the same order and the same meaning.

Morph (Greek – shape, form) – 1) combination of phones that has a meaning, 2) meaningful group of phones which cannot be subdivided into smaller meaningful units.

Types of morphemes:

Morpheme

Bases (root-morphemes) Affixes

The roots express the concrete, material part of the meaning of the word. The roots of notional words are classical lexical morphemes.

Express the specificational part of the meaning of the word, the specifications

Prefixes suffixes

(all derivational)

Inflectional derivational

Always final in the morpheme groups to which they belong, are of wide occurrence, making large form-classes. Distribution tends to be regular.

May be final in the morpheme groups to which they belong, or may be followed by other derivational suffixes or inflexional suffixes. They are of relatively limited occurrence, and their distribution tendsto be arbitrary.

Bound bases – are morphemes which serve as stems for derivational forms but which never appear as free forms. By comparing “conclude”, “occlude”, “preclude”, “include”, we come to the conclusion that there is a morpheme [-klude], which never serves as a stem for these various derivational forms. Yet we never find it as a free form, that is, we can find no environment into which [-klude] fits in…₁