Word-structure

Words consist of morphemes.

A morpheme is defined as the smallest indivisible two-facet language unit. A morpheme is an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words. Nor are they divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is why a morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful language unit.

The term "morpheme" is derived from Greek "morphe" ("form") + -erne. The Greek suffix -eme has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest unit (phoneme, sememe). A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form.

Morphemes may have different phonemic shapes.

In the word-cluster "please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant" the root morpheme is represented by the phonetic shapes [pli:z], [рlез], [plez]. All the representations of the given morpheme are called allomorphs or morpheme variants.

Principles of morphemic analysis

As far as the complexity of me morphemic structure of the word is concerned, all English words fall into two large classes:

1) segmentable words, i.e. those which may be segmented into morphemes (agreement, fearless);.

2) non-segmentable words, i.e. those which cannot be segmented into morphemes (house, husband).

The morphemic analysis aims at splitting a segmentable word into its constituent morphemes — the basic units at this level of word-structure analysis — and at determining their number and types. Three- types of morphemic segmentability of words .are distinguished: complete, conditional and defective.

Complete segmentability is characteristic of a great many words, the morphemic structure of which is transparent enough, as their individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word and can be easily isolated. The transparent morphemic structure of the segmentable words "boiler", "driller", "writer" is conditioned by the fact that its constituent morphemes recur with the same meaning in a number of other words (to boil, boiling, a drill, drilling, a writer, writing) (teacher, reader, etc.).

Conditional morphemic segmentability characterizes words whose segmentation into constituent morphemes is doubtful for semantic reasons. In the words retain, contain, detain or receive, deceive, perceive the sound-clusters [n], [di], [kәn] seem to be singled out quite easily due to their recurrence in a number of words.

On the other hand, they have nothing in common with the phonetically identical morphemes re-, de — which are found in the words rewrite, decode. The sound-clusters [n], [di], [tein], [si:v] in the words under analysis possess no lexical or functional meaning of their own. The types of meaning that can be ascribed to them are differential and distributional: [n] distinguishes "retain" from "detain". The morphemes making up words of conditional segmentability are called pseudo — morphemes or quasi-morphemes.

Defective morphemic segmentability — is the property of words whose component morphemes seldom or never recur in other words. One of the component morphemes of these words is a unique morpheme in the sense that it does not recur in a different linguistic environment. A unique morpheme is isolated and displays a more or less clear denotational meaning. In the word "hamlet" the morpheme — "let" has the meaning of diminutiveness; this morpheme occurs in the words "ringlet", "leaflet", "streamlet". The sound-cluster [haem], that is left after the isolation of the morpheme "-let" does not recur in any other English word. The morpheme "ham" — carries differential and distributional meanings as it distinguishes "hamlet" from "streamlet". This morpheme is qualified as unique. Other examples of unique morphemes: cran — (cranberry - клюква), goose — (gooseberry - крыжовник), straw — (strawberry- земляника, клубника).