9.The morpheme as an elementary meaningful unit. Classification of morphemes.

The morpheme is the elementary meaningful part of the word. It is built up by phonemes, so that shortest morpheme includes only one phoneme. Ex.: ros - у [i], afire [e], come-s [z]. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is a freestanding unit of meaning. Every word comprises one or more morphemes.

The morpheme expresses abstract, significative meanings, which are used as constituents for the formation of more concrete, nominative meanings of words. Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members. Types of morphemes. Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, or "free". Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in Bound morphemes like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Morphemes existing in only one bound form are known as "cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word. Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on. (as in the dog morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme s becomes dogs). Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."

Morphemic structure of a word:

a)free (blamed, beautifully) –– on the basis of the degree of self-dependence –– b) bound (blamed, beautifully)

a)overt (clock + s) ––on the basis of formal presentation ––b)covert (clock + zero morpheme of singular number)

a)segmental (root and affixes)‏–on the basis of segmental relation –b)supra-segmental (intonation contours, accents, pauses )‏

a) additive (outer grammatical suffixes)‏–on the basis of grammatical alternation –b) replacive (the root phonemes of grammatical interchange: dr-i-ve - dr-o-ve - dr-i-ven )

a) continuous (is working, has driven)‏–on the basis of linear characteristic –b) discontinuous (work, drives)‏

a) meaningful (root and affixes)‏–on the basis of meaningfulness –b) empty (connecting morphemes: child-r-e)

10.The word as the smallest naming unit and the main unit of morphology.

In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed).

A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board, rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (he threw one too but he missed).

The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols called graphemes, such as the letters of English.

A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound. As the word is the main unit of traditional grammatical theory, it serves the basis of the distinction which is frequently "drawn between morphology and syntax. Morphology deals with the internal structure of words, peculiarities of their grammatical categories and their semantics while traditional syntax deals with the rules governing combination of words in sentences (and texts in modern linguistics). We can therefore say that the word is the main unit of morphology. It is difficult to arrive at a one-sentence definition of such a complex linguistic unit as the word. It is also the basic nominative unit of language with the help of which the naming function of language is realized. One of the most characteristic features of the word is its indivisibility. As any other linguistic unit the word is a bilateral entity. It unites a concept and a sound image and thus has two sides - the content and expression sides: concept and sound form.