MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THE WORD

A word is a fundamental autonomous unit of the language in which a particular meaning is associated with a particular sound complex.

The word consists of morphemes.

Morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest (indivisible) meaningful language unit. Unlike the words morphemes are not free and occur in speech only as constituent parts of word. A word, however, may consist of a single morpheme.

Morphemes are subdivided

1. According to the degree of autonomy into

- bound morphemes (e.g. eleg-ant)

- free morphemes (e.g. sport-ive, sport-s-man).

Bound morphemes can also function as words while bound morphemes not.

2.According to the role they play in constructing words into

- root morphemes dishearten, kind-hearted.

- affixes (prefixes and suffixes)

dishearten, kind-hearted.

Affixes are subdivided into

- derivational (affixes used to derive new words: like - unlike, short - shortage, beauty - beautiful.

- functional (affixes used to form new forms of the same word. They express a grammatical category ( tense, person, case etc.) e.g. worked, reads, father‘s

A prefix is a derivational morpheme that stands before the root and modifies its meaning.

A suffix is a derivational morpheme that follows the stem and forms a new derivative.

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Structural types of words

According to their morphological structure words are subdivided into 4 groups:

• root/simple words– words consisting of one root morpheme and sometimes an inflexion (heart, seldom, chairs, longer, asked)

• affixational derivatives –words consisting of a root morpheme and one or more affixes (hearty, heartless, unemployed, disillusion)

• compounds/compound words – words in which two or very rarely more stems simple or derived are combined into a lexical unit (sweetheart, heart-broken, girl-friend)

• derivational compounds/compound derivative – where words or a phrase are joined together by composition and affixation (kindhearted, middle-of-the-roaders, job-hopper).

Analysis into immediate constituents

Analysis into immediate constituents is a synchronic morphological analysis, consisting of breaking a word into two meaningful parts, layer by layer until the ultimate constituents (непосредственно составляющие) are left. This analysis was first suggested by L. Bloomfield and later developed by many linguists.

e.g. un - gentlemanly

un - gentleman - ly

un - gentle - man – ly

Comparing the word with other utterances we recognize the morpheme un- as a negative prefix (compare unnatural, unfortunate, uncertain) and the morpheme gentlemanly. Thus at the first cut of the analysis we obtain the bound negative morpheme un- and the free morpheme gentlemanly. At the second cut we obtain the following immediate constituents: the noun stem gentleman- which occurs in other utterances and the suffix -ly with the meaning “having the quality of the person denoted by the stem” (compare womanly, masterly, soldierly). The third cut is an adjective stem gentle- (a similar pattern is observed in nobleman) and -man which may be classified as a semi-affix.

WORD FORMATION / WORD BUILDING

Word formation, or word building is one of the main ways of enriching the vocabulary. There are four main ways of word formation: affixation, compounding/composition, conversion and shortening/clipping. There are also secondary ways of word formation: sound interchange, stress interchange, sound imitation, blending, back formation.

1. AFFIXATION

Throughout the history of English affixation has been one of the most productive ways of word formation.