Questions:

1. What are proverbs? Why should lexicology study them?

2. What are familiar quotations?

3. What are the main sources of familiar quotations in English?

4. What are clichés?

Tasks:

1. What type of word-groups do we observe here?

a blue () sky

a magnifying glass

to guess – to give a guess

Artesian well

How do you do?

to make up

2. What type of phraseological unit according to the functional classification do we observe here?

show the hills, take the bull by the horns

odds and adds, a bull in a China shop

side by side, in the long run

My eye!

Seminar 7

Morphological Structure of English Words and Word-Formation Morphemes, Their Definition. Allomorphs

R.S. Ginzburg, A Course in Modern English Lexicology, §1. Segmentation of Words into Morphemes [p. 89]

Close observation and comparison ofwords clearly shows that a great many words have a composite nature and are madeup of smaller units, each possessing sound-form and meaning. These are generally referred to as morphemes defined as the smallest indivisible two-facet language units. For instance, words likeboiler, driller fall into the morphemesboil-, drill- and -er by virtue of the recurrence of the morpheme -er in these and other similar words and of the morphemesboil- anddrill- into boil, a boil, boiling andto drill, a drill, drilling, a drill-press, etc. Likewise, words likeflower-pot andshoe-laceare segmented into the morphemesflower-, pot-, shoe- andlace- (cf. flower-show, flowerful, etc.,shoe-brush, shoeless, etc., on the one hand; andpot-lid, pottery, etc.,lace-boots, lacing, etc., on the other).

Like aword a morpheme is a two-facet language unit, an association of a certain meaning with a certain sound-pattern. Unlike a word a mor­pheme is not an autonomous unit and can occur in speech only as a con­stituent part of the word.

Morphemes cannot be segmented into smaller units without losing their constitutive essence, i.e. two-facetedness, association of a certain meaning with a given sound-pattern, cf. the morpheme lace- denoting 'a string or cord put through small holes in shoes', etc.; 'to draw edges to­gether' and the constituent phonemes [1], [eɪ], [s] entirely without meaning.

Identification of morphemes in various texts shows that morphemes may have different phonemic shapes.

In the word-clusterplease, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant the root-mor­pheme is represented by phonemic shapes: [pli:z] inplease, pleasing, [pleʒ] inpleasure and [plez] inpleasant. In such cases we say that the pho­nemic shapes of the word stand in complementary distribution or in alternation with each other. All the representations of the given mor­pheme that manifest alteration are called allomorphs of that mor­pheme or morpheme variants. Thus [pli:z, plez] and [pleʒ] are allomorphs of one and the same morpheme. The root-morphemes in the word-clusterduke, ducal, duchess, duchy orpoor, poverty may also serve as examples of the allomorphs of one morpheme.

Questions:

1. What is a morpheme?

2. What distinguished morphemes from words and phonemes?

3. What are allomorphs?